TBPN Live - "The Information" Profiles TBPN, AI Ups and Downs, Nuclear Regulation | Zach Weinberg, Leigh Marie Braswell, Stephen Balaban, Sam Lessin, Bobby Goodlatte, Auren Hoffman, Doug Bernauer, Isaiah Taylor

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(05:41) - The Information Profiles TBPN (39:44) - Apple's AI Struggles (41:22) - Sam Altman's Trillion Dollar AI Device (46:15) - Jori Lallo. Jori is the co-founder of Linear, a streamlined product management tool used by top startups and engineering teams. He previously co-founded Coinbase and has a background in building elegant, fast, and developer-centric software products. (01:01:43) - Zach Weinberg. Zach is a co-founder and general partner at Operator Partners and previously co-founded Flatiron Health, which was acquired by Roche for $1.9 billion. He is an active seed investor and operator across healthcare and software startups. (01:31:50) - Leigh Marie Braswell. Leigh Marie is a partner at Founders Fund, focused on early-stage AI and infrastructure companies. She previously worked at Scale AI and has a background in electrical engineering and machine learning. (02:00:19) - Stephen Balaban. Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of Lambda, a company building high-performance GPU infrastructure for training AI models. He’s been at the forefront of deep learning hardware and computer vision since the early days of modern AI. (02:31:06) - Sam Lessin. Sam is a general partner at Slow Ventures and a former VP of product at Facebook. He writes The Information’s Private Tech column and invests across consumer, media, and frontier tech. (02:59:35) - Bobby Goodlatte. Bobby is an early-stage investor and designer, known for his early role at Facebook and his investments in companies like Coinbase and Lambda School. He is a founding partner at Form Capital. (03:14:47) - Auren Hoffman. Auren is the CEO of SafeGraph and previously founded LiveRamp, which was acquired by Acxiom. He is an expert in data infrastructure and frequently writes about technology, policy, and markets. (03:31:04) - Doug Bernauer. Doug is the founder and CEO of Radiant Industries, a company developing portable nuclear reactors to power remote locations and space missions. He previously worked at SpaceX and is focused on building scalable, clean energy infrastructure. (03:47:28) - Isaiah Taylor. Isaiah is a policy and public affairs advisor focused on the intersection of AI, government, and society. He has worked with leading AI labs and policymakers on responsible innovation, regulation, and deployment of advanced technologies.

You're watching TV, man. Today is Friday, May 23rd, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. And John, this is our last show in this studio. It is. It is. But the Fortress of Finance lives on.

The Capital of Capital lives on. It's a state of mind. It's a state of mind. It's a place on the internet that we bring. We create the Fortress of Finance,, the temple of technology wherever we are. And soon it will be in Hollywood, California, the future home of media and entertainment once we're done with it, baby.

We're bringing media to Hollywood. We got a great show for you today, folks. We got a banger lineup of guests and topics. Wow, we really filled it out. I thought we had four people booked. Turns out we have seven now. It's great. I don't know how that happened, John.

We're talking about the information. They profiled us. Abe came down, hung out with us for a full day, wrote a very nice piece. And the allegations are extreme. Yeah, the allegations of bro culture over here are extreme. We'll talk about Apple's AI struggles, Sam Altman's trillion dollar AI device.

There's a banger quote in the Wall Street Journal from Berber Gin. And then we got a whole bunch of guests. Jory from Linear, Zach from Curie, Lee Marie Brasswell, former colleague of mine over at Founders Fund. Now she's at Kleiner Perkins, coming on to talk about artificial intelligence,

some of the seed investing she's been doing. Remember, she was like a seed investor in Windsurf, I believe, absolute banger. Absolutely dog. And we got Sam Lesson coming on. We got the founder of Lambda. And the great thing, so Sam Lesson, many people call him Jessica Lesson's husband.

Yes. He usually goes by that in most tech circles. So Jessica Lesson's husband is coming on and this was booked before we knew if the information was gonna be a hit piece or a puff piece. And so it could have been, we don't, still unclear exactly where it landed,

but it could have been a very heated. Oh, it could have been extremely confrontational. And it still could get heated. And I think the first or second time he came on, Jessica Lesson was in the background and kind of stopped by and said, hey. She said, hi. Hi. And so if you know, if this,

if this piece hadn't gone down the way it did, we could have been screaming on the call and she would have overheard us berating her husband about what happened. But fortunately, uh, the piece, I think it'll be pretty PC later. And I'm excited to talk to Sam, uh, and then one of the greatest yappers of all time, Bobby and Orin also calling in at two and two 15. And so, 15 and so we're gonna be going late It's a three and a half hour show. Let's do it. They said hey, it's Friday Are you gonna take your foot off the gas? Absolutely not. Absolutely. Absolutely not

Anyway, let's read through how the technology brothers seized Silicon Valley the big read in the weekend section And I thought this image by the way if we can pull it up I Thought it was my immediate thought was AI and you think it's handcrafted. You think they went I think there are pieces of AI in here, but then there are also things in Here that are collage. There's a lot of Photoshop Might be AI but the faces are just photos that have just been tuned up. And then, for example, the number overlay, that is not AI.

They made me quite a bit wider than you even. They did make me extremely wide. Which is not my exact build, but I'll take it. So the screenshot that's up on the stream is the real one, but for some reason, on the information, there's a like an HTML bug And so if you shrink down the website, I don't know if we can pull up the one from the PDF But it makes us look even wider How do you have a PDF John why do you have a PDF I always make a PDF of everything every article so we can

share the show I'm a paid PDF of everything every article so that we can hear the show Yes, I am a paid subscriber of the information PDF allegations are flying around. Yeah today any black market is Article that people want to read it shares around But yeah He says at a time when when tech has been at loggerheads with the traditional media The industry elite have gladly accepted a warm embrace from a pair of insider talk show hosts, John Coogan and Jordy Hayes.

A warm embrace. Yeah. I mean, part of it is that we typically don't want to have someone on the show unless if we saw them, we'd give them a warm embrace. Yes. So I think that's generally accurate. We try to sort out and not have people on that we wanna get into conflicts with. At some points we'll have people on the show that we disagree with, but. But in general, the like. We're trying to have people on

that we generally admire and respect. Just to fight and argue. We wanna just hang out with our friends. trying to have people on just to fight and argue. You know, we wanna just hang out with our friends. Yeah, if we get to the point where we're getting ultra contentious, we'll probably move to like a pay-per-view model for that. So if you wanna see Keith Raboi fight with a journalist, you know, potentially and physically,

not just on the timeline, we could set that up. I'd love to But anyway, so in recent months John Kugin and Jordi Hayes co-host of TVP and a daily tech news show that has captured the attention of Silicon Valley's Investors and founders have followed the same morning routine the two men meet in downtown Los Angeles at a members-only Jonathan Club to work out then saw it together while reading print copies of the Wall Street Journal That's true fact-check true to work out then sonnet together while reading print copies of the Wall Street Journal. Fact check true. Fact check true.

You have your sweaty copy on the table today, it's real. The image of Kugen 36 and Hayes 29 schvitzing away in such a manner is well a little ridiculous in this day and age. And I posted that God forbid men have hobbies. There's nothing ridiculous about two guys meeting up at a member's club and having a sauna and reading the journal.

And he thought I was joking with him, but I was dead serious that we had actually been in the, in the sauna just a little bit earlier. You quote in the article, this was in the sauna, pointing to a bedraggled A section of the journal besides on the club's dining room table. It has sweat all over it. Yeah, there's the wide version of us because it's been stretched

That extra wide wider It's great Yeah, so I had to prove to him I actually did invite him to the morning workout I said meet up with us at 630. It's chest day. We'll we'll hit some PRS on the bench and then we'll go in the sauna We'll talk we'll get breakfast. He He was traveling around, couldn't make it, so he just came to breakfast. So I had to prove to him by showing him the sweat. Not the first time we've invited somebody

to do a workout though. It's the best. And then had them come up with some range of excuses. Oh, I'm not gonna be able to get there at six. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. It is a high bar, but yeah. We don't do coffee meetings.

Naval says, set your opportunity cost extremely high. He said meet like a lion. Meet like a lion. Be hitting bench when you're meeting with someone. Naval is the original, the lion does not concern himself meme. Like that's where that came from basically. Work like a lion.

He doesn't concern himself with much. He doesn't, he doesn't concern himself with email. Doesn't concern himself with coffee meetings. But he doesn't concern himself with email yeah doesn't concern himself with coffee meetings but the gym meeting it's highly efficient actually I mean I Strauss Zelnick the CEO of take two owns GTA putting out GTA 6 soon he is famous for doing workouts and doing workout meetings and so I read that book and I kind of adopted that and started doing workouts with Ben and talking to him about the business

while we're working out. And it's just a fantastic flow. It's the best way to hang. So they go on, Abe goes on to write, Kugin and Hayes live streamed TBPN, which they originally christened the Technology Brothers as a knowing nod to the concept of a tech bro on X and YouTube from 11 a.m.

to 2 p.m. Pacific and publish the recording on Apple podcasts and Spotify when I found them sitting down to breakfast at the Jonathan Club they had mostly prepped their opening commentary on the news Airbnb's revamp the Trump administration's proposed changes to chip AI chip exports and they had a number of guests booked such as founders fund delian as per who have Lux capitals Josh wolf and Eugenia Kudya, who startup replica AI hopes to develop chat bots that can serve as human companions.

So here's where it gets interesting, John. Yes. It says, like the show's audience, the guests are attracted to quote unquote TBPN. Yeah, like it doesn't, it's not a real thing. Like it's not a real thing. As a safe refuge from the mainstream media. Yeah.

One that projects an unabashed unapologetic enthusiasm for tech. I think this is my best line in here. I'm glad Abe included it. We genuinely love the private markets, the venture capital industry, the startup industrial complex. So there's something interesting here. TBPN is in quotes, but I'm on a different article from the information and it reads, Jim Kramer, CNBC's Mad Money host, took a swipe at our report today, and CNBC isn't in quotes. Why is it?

That's so interesting. Maybe they see it as more legitimate. In the- Oh, it could be a bug. In the CMS, in the content management system? Maybe they should switch content management systems. I like- If they're making bugs like that

or sneaking it into articles. ABE's our boy. Yeah. And I'm gonna just, I'm gonna assume that it was just an accident. Probably just a mistake. Yeah, probably just a mistake. Uh.

We genuinely love bugs. Since TVPN debuted last October, Hayes and Coogan have warmly welcomed investors from pretty much every major firm, venture, venture firm in existence. Let's go. We're Switzerland, Switzerland over here, a marker of the podcast, widening appeal Sequoia, Cosola, Lightspeed, I could go on a week or so ago, they

dispatched one of their four producers to Las Vegas to set up a mini studio at Andreessen Horowitz is annual investor day summit where the firm's executives could chat about tech the news, and what they were presenting to their investors a level of access. No one in regular media would ever get Thank you to Eric and the whole team and it's recent. That's making that happen. I want to do more of those Yeah, I'm talking to coastal about that. I think that's like an interesting thing the sit down with like the full partnership to get the full scope of how everything fits together because most founders, even in my career, have interacted with every fund, but

usually just a single partner. And so you usually have this very point, maybe you've listened to Mark and then you've interacted with David George on a deal or David Haber on a deal, or something like that. It's rare to be able to see like all in one. I like the way that that came together, so I'm hoping to do more of those. Anyway, so it goes on, he includes TBPN in quotes again, which is-

TBPN is in quotes every single time it's listed. And the information includes TBPN in quotes. Anyways, it goes on, talks about some of the guests that we've had. I thought this was funny. Augustus Rico, who started up Rainmaker Technology, has come on the show, has a sky high dream of commercializing cloud seeding,

a process of adding chemicals to the atmosphere to increase precipitation. He's a good writer, sky high precipitation. He's a good writer. Sky High Dream. It's a good line. As Hayes and Coogan have won attention from a swath of the tech neradi and have achieved a constant social media virality, their consistent social media virality, their audience has remained incredibly niche.

While they see X as their main platform, They have just about 130,000 followers on their accounts and the one belonging to the show on YouTube, TBPN has only around 7,000 subscribers. It's weird to be like incredibly niche, 130,000 followers. Like, how many you got, Abe? How many? Hey, let's pull up, let's go analytics for analytics. No, let's go analytics for analytics.

When was the last time you dropped a 20K banger on the timeline? Let's check it out. Let's pull up your analytics for analytics. No, let's go analytics for analytics. When was the last time you dropped a 20k banger on the timeline? Let's check it out. Let's see. Let's see how wide. You know, Jordy has 100,000 likes on a post. 150. 150k likes.

Is that niche? Is that niche? Oh, you know that my Xi Jinping video on YouTube has three million views. You know that my analysis of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse attempts has eight million views. How niche is that? How nice is that? Yeah, I mean this is actually something we think about is like it's like there are obvious tam expanders politics is the obvious one

And we've and we've deliberately said we're not going to try and tam expand is to a watching It's watching you says I demand a rebuttal Should we let him call it right now? Yeah, let's have him call in. Okay, so the link send him the link Abe Come on in Anyways They have no investors and profess to have zero intentions of raising capital less those investors Did you mention our incredibly complex corporate structure because we do have a nonprofit that feeds into an LLC, that feeds into a C Corp. That feeds into the labs.

Labs, which is of course owned by Wilmanitis. Wilmandis. Wilmandis. This was a fun quote, which I stand by. We could go out and within an hour, I guarantee you, we could raise probably like $15 million. And I believe that would destroy us. I think that's true. So we very intentionally not raised venture capital. It would be your final party round. The final party round.

The final party round. If you could pull in. Because I mean realistically we could get everyone but it would very much change it would very much change the dynamic of the show. Yeah. It would be it would very much change. It would very much change the dynamic of the show. It would be less fun. I asked Ramp CEO Eric Gleiman what he found so appealing about the show and he likened their approach to how ESPN chronicles sports where Sports Center has players, coaches, and games

to celebrate and explain TBPN as founders, investors, and developer conferences. They're able to bring to life the personalities, the play-by-play and capture the zeitgeist. Thank you, Eric. That's a great quote. That's exactly what we're going for. Coogan and Hayes often hear themselves compared

to ESPN commentators, but the analogy's sort of lost on them because putting a major dent in their bro credentials neither watches much sports content. To Hayes, the natural comparison is to Clubhouse, an audio social media app that was popular for a moment during the pandemic. We've taken what natural comparison is to Clubhouse, an audio social media app that was popular for a moment during the pandemic. We've taken what the magic of early Clubhouse was

where you could hear an interesting investor or founder talking in real time about what was happening that day, what's in the news, and turn that into a show. Ultimately, TBPN, allegedly, if it exists at all, if it's a real thing, hopes to better capitalize on the same broad truth about tech's relationship with old school media that underpin Clubhouse. More and more Silicon Valley has come to distrust

traditional journalists, perceiving them as holding an unshakable bias against the industry, part of an undeniable broader shift in American culture against the established media. Many within tech have tried to build their own in-house media operations, or have rapaciously thrown millions of dollars that would be disruptors like Clubhouse Most such efforts have flopped mounting to little more than lame public relations who can haze seem to have found their sweet spot They maintain just enough independence from their subjects

But feel none of the pressure for critical coverage most journalists in their position would they also? Get far on their twin blessings of easy charm and boyish good looks. And now this is interesting, cause charm's a little, it's a little bit of a charged word in my culture. Totally, Irish culture. Yeah, so I'm Irish obviously. For those that don't know, Hayes and Coogan. We're both Irish.

Schott's Irish. And so, you know, Saint Patrick is obviously a famous snake charmer and charmed all the snakes out of Ireland, and so it's kind of like is this like is it racial it's I don't want to go racist but it's a show it's definitely racial and so yeah it's a little bit edgy but I mean I appreciate it it's fun yes we're in the post woke era we're totally anti woke era totally and so they want to go there and you want to go there

Go charm for charm with anyone we can go charm for charm with the best of them It's just a little crazy because I haven't been you don't normally think a potato potato think of Information drunk and Nick editor as an edge lord. Yeah, no, you don't but but he snuck in. Yeah, it's good. It's a little Yeah, I saw him chugging Guinness passed out like a drunk Irishman, you know, he didn't go that far He didn't go that he stepped it back. Yeah, but he still threw in a little bit of the Irish a little dig at Irishness Yeah, make sense They have an interesting they have an interesting voice that I don't think many people could pull off said Ashley Vance the Elon Musk biographer and former New York Times and Bloomberg journo. Journo.

They use journo. I thought that was our word for them and Bloomberg. He's taking it back. Abe's taking back journo. Wait, that's actually interesting. That's crazy. He highlights earlier. No, he highlights earlier in the article that we took back Techbro.

They're taking back journo. But Techbro was a slur. We took it back as technology brothers. But he's taking back journo. He's kind of inverting it. He's saying, I'm not a journalist, I'm a journo. I'm a journo. I'm a journo.

It's kind of cool. I like it. I'm into this. It's kind of cool. Journoism is back. Yeah. What is it? What is it, Kibitz? Do you know what that is? Because it said, Ashley came on for Kibitz.

Look on and offer unwelcome advice, especially at a card. A chat. A chat. Oh, a chat. Okay, so he came on for a chat, yeah. And he's coming on. He's coming back next week. He's been traveling, shooting a movie, very cool stuff. I don't know if you saw his cinema rig,

but he's got like 25 different cinema cameras. It's amazing. I'm really excited to see what he's doing I don't want to leak too much Abe Abe is Abe is in the temple. He is Abe we got to get to the bottom of this Abe Wow Abe on TV p.m. I Wow, Abe on TBPN for the first time ever. I couldn't believe it. I could go into exactly why CNBC doesn't get quotes and you guys do, but that seems boring. Let's talk about it, it'll be more fun.

Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. Editors, the Chiron's way wrong. Can we put the information in quotes? Can we put the information in quotes? Can we put the information in quotes? Can we put the information in quotes? We have to. It's fantastic to have you on. We talked about this earlier.

We knew, I mean, Jessica Lesson's husband was going to come on later today and it would have been a funny kind of dynamic if this had been a hit piece, which we obviously didn't know until around 9 a.m. when you hit publish so this will be a fun show end to end yeah it was great I don't know is there anything else that I mean you've been listening to our analysis anything else you need to get off your chest no I think

the story you know is a piece of fair and accurate journalism. And you guys are doing what you do best, which is commentating on the news, on the breaking news about the Schenlinger brothers. Wait, I have to ask, did you intentionally use the word journo instead of journalist when talking about Ashley Vance?

Yeah, because we think of journo as like a tech bro style, like light dig. Like it's almost a slur for journalist. It's you know, guys, in the way that you're funny on camera. Yeah, I also try to be funny in the way I write, you know, just to, you know, make the make the make the jokes go around. No, you nailed it. You nailed it. I mean, you got us. We're cracking up.

It's great. It's really good. I'll be back in LA soon, and I'll take you up on the sauna. Let's do it. Oh, fantastic. We can't wait. Let's do it.

Yeah, we gotta get a big one in the new studio. Yeah. We gotta basically dedicate 2,000 square feet to just a single sauna. For sure. Abe, thank you for the fun and Fair coverage. Yeah, what we're doing fantastic And likewise you guys are a good hang don't be a don't be too nice to Sam. Okay. Okay, we won't

We'll be rough on him. We'll put him in streets out Awesome. Thanks for jumping on. Yeah Look at that. Look at that meet media, technology, you know, just growing down. It's great to see it. They give a little bit of our background, but then go on to talk about how we met, mutual friend. Do they actually not, they didn't name Will Mandus. He didn't name it Will Manitus.

Saw an opportunity for a tech-focused podcast that could analyze industry news with a light irreverence and wasn't tied to a single company or venture Firm last fall they had enough free time on their hands to record a couple test episodes when they attended Peter teals her reticon at the faena Feedback from David center host of the popular Founders podcast, if you could call it that. Wait, did Abe actually tell us why he puts it in quotes? I don't think-

No, he said it wouldn't be fun. He said it wouldn't be fun, which is fair. No, I mean, it makes sense. You're introducing this to the first time to your audience. We're given a hard time, but obviously- Yeah, it's called TBPN., but like, yeah, obviously called TBP. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, like if TBPN becomes like driving news

and the information months from now has written about comments that were said on TBPN and they're citing us, I imagine that we will become unquoted. Like we will, we will earn the removal of our quotes. Earn your stripes throwing off the shackles of the quotes. I'm excited. That's that's definitely on the on the vision board right next to TBP on Aron on smoothie. You heard it here first. We're working on it.

David center previously advised Kugen on his YouTube channel. This is funny because like it was very, very informal, but I did learn a ton from David. I remember the very first time I talked to him, I was doing my YouTube channel very much part-time, just one day a week on the weekend. When I was bored, I'd just put up a video, and I did one a week.

And it was growing and it was doing well. And I was just like, wait, you have this podcast that's like, this is pre-deal, this is pre-Invest Like the Best partnership and pre-Meeting Patrick and stuff. So the show was pretty small at that time. And I was like, wait, you do this full-time? And he was like, yeah, and he swore upon you.

I was one of the first advertisers on Founders Podcast. I had no idea. No way. Yeah, I was one of the first one or two. And I certainly won't mention it here. And the funny thing is I had actually reached out to David. And I really didn't. I listened to the first episode, and I reached out to him,

and I was like, would you? This was at a time that was like every tech company should be a media company, which I don't agree with anymore. But I was like, would you consider joining? Like he told me his ad rates and I was like, well, what if we just like acquired founders? And in hindsight, that was like such a ridiculous thing to ask because David never under any circumstances

would have done that or anything like it, nor would it have been good for the show. But yeah, at that time, it was like very, very, you know. Yeah, no, I remember getting on the phone with him and he was telling me, I was like, so do you do this full time? How do you even make that work? He was like, and he swore a bunch.

He was like, absolutely. I don't do anything else, this is all I do. And I was just like super impressed that he'd been able to make this work. And it is like a niche show, it certainly was at the time, but he obviously found a really high value audience and it was already monetizing very well.

At that point he had like a paywall for some of the episodes. He was starting to do some advertising. He's evolved the business model a ton. And probably a hundred acts. The product quality was incredible. But he was like, it was still. It was just him, no employees, nothing, just building, building, building.

So it was very, very cool. And so yeah, I mean I learned a lot from him and kind of kept growing the channel and then eventually evolved into this. He thought that the two shared natural chemistry and encouraged them to go all in on the concept, which we've talked about before. For a model, he suggested they look at sports commentator

Pat McAfee, Senra ad Myers McAfee's always on persona. What is Pat doing right now? I bet he's live streaming, he said. And I wasn't exactly sure, because we've looked to Pat for as like a role model in many ways, but I wasn't exactly sure where that came from. But I thought the most interesting lesson that I learned from David was that he actually

did not tell us you guys should live stream. He told us you should take this 100x more seriously. You should go harder. You should go full time on this. And what was interesting is that the we were doing a weekly podcast with no guests and once we started taking it way, way more seriously and working on it constantly, then switching it into a daily show, switching it on it constantly, then switching it into a daily show, switching it into a live show, switching it into a guest-led show. All of that just happened very naturally.

He didn't tell us tactics. He just told us exactly what he says in every episode of Founders. Even we left Miami and we decided to go to two or three days a week. I think we did three days a week. Yeah, maybe it was three days a week. But then I remember the realization

that we would stop recording and we would be on X like an hour later. And I'd just be like, I wish we were doing the show tomorrow. And then we just eventually decided to go to five days. Then we decided to go live. Then we decided to add guests. I even remember talking to you about like, maybe we should do like one day a week, five hours,

and then slice it up so we're releasing one hour per day. Never podcast weekly, John. And it was a terrible idea, and I'm so glad we didn't do it. It's a way, way better format. And so Abe goes on to write, Soon Coogan and Hayes landed on an early gag that helped them gain attention. Print out posts from ex, from founders and investors, then dress up in suits and film themselves with

top end 4k cameras discussing the posts, a very high touch approach to assembling retweets. Later they started to share the clips and tag the post's authors on X and the authors would often frequently pass on the clips themselves giving Kugin and Hayes some of their first virality. The pair set themselves up on the 10th floor office Coogan and Hayes some of their first virality. The pair set themselves up on the 10th floor office that Coogan rented in the Jonathan Club, hired a small video production crew. They sometimes refer to as just the guys.

Well, since, well, they're all young men. And over the course of the next several months, the TBPN hosts and the guys have adopted a steady rhythm when Kugin and Haves go Live two of the guys control what appears on the stream including the Kyrons The bit of text below. Yeah, I didn't even we didn't even know the the term Kyron For like we had been doing a Kyron for quite a while I do explain it to basically everyone But I had in fact heard the term before. You have a background in big television

jobs? No I've been to NAB. I've been a nerd for like production for like several years. Yeah and so I've been like loosely familiar with all this stuff. I watched a lot of YouTube videos explaining how churches do live streams. Oh yeah. Because mega churches are delivering at a level that is equivalent to Fox News on 1 one hundredth of the budget. And so you can just go on YouTube and search church live streaming setup

and they will have tested everything and they share all the information. It's a bevy of resources. It's fantastic. And some of them do like virtual productions. It gets crazy. Anyway, they try to make these funny. One example, venture capitalist yaps about venture capital. I'm excited to share a screenshot of Abe Brown, writer at The Information. Did you see the file, Chiron? So good. So good. Steady crawl of the show. Sponsors appear

next to the Chirons, along with a ticker available of available Polymarket bats with Kugin Hayes see as telling indicators of market sentiment and their audience's interests That's true Another of the guys spends the entire show entirety of the show cutting up clips to publish across social media as quickly as possible fourth Ben Kohler Let's hear for vice president Ben Who worked with Kuginaw's YouTube videos, serves as head producer.

On a traditional TV show, a producer would normally pre-interview a guest. Sounds really boring. To help both the guest and the host. But Kuginaw and Hayes prefer to wing it. And since they're never brandishing any sort of gotcha question, we'll hit you with some gotchas.

We're just gonna do nerdy gotchas about scaling laws and build out timelines and algorithms. We're not going to ask about your personal life or your politics. We do not discuss politics. The informality doesn't discomfort the guests. There's no prep. They just sent me a Zoom link and I joined.

Said Shamsankar, Palantir's chief technology officer and a veteran of many CNBC hits. To fill the spots Kugin has tapped their Rolodex is an industry connections unsurprisingly they've started to get inbound requests we're at the point where we're getting 20 pitches a day from PR firms Kugin said we turned down 95% his rejection method is simple he goes to X and checks whether they've shared recent what they've shared recently their number of followers and whether they follow the same people. Yeah, I'm generally looking for like, are they tapped into the news?

Are they following technology stories? Are they, you know, at all lengths? I wouldn't say this is one part of the process, but certainly we've had people on that don't have a presence on the X, and we actually wanna do a lot more of that. Yeah, totally. But it helps if somebody is a part of the conversation.

But if you're just getting a pitch instead of a warm introduction. Totally. It's very hard to do a lot more of that. Totally. Yeah, totally. But it helps if somebody is a part of the conversation. But if you're just getting a pitch instead of a warm introduction. It's very hard to get a pitch from someone that's very dry. And then because every once in a while, there's someone who is interesting that just happens to have a stale PR team that's kind of pitching broadly. And you got to just deal with that.

But most of the time, if there's just some stock like You get these big emails with all these bullet points of everything the person's accomplished And then they'd link you to their LinkedIn account you search them on X and like they're not really in the conversation And if they're not in the conversation It's gonna be hard for them to join and have a conversation Is that not bring something really they're just gonna come on with talking points and so yeah It's pointless or if they come on with LinkedIn takes from it's not good two months ago not good gonna work Hayes and Coogan delight in their shtick for the

show which includes opening bottles of Dom Perignon to markets growth a constant tongue-in-cheek showing of ramp ramp ramp ramp which makes expense account software that would exasperate many mad men but not us not us not us switch your business to ramp.com. Save time and money. Just do it. We had a whole running gag with Abe the entire time. We probably pitched him ramp seven different times.

At least. At one point I introduced him to Eric over at ramp and then I immediately followed up, acted like I took him off the email thread and told Eric, here are the talking points we're sticking to. You gotta post that. I gotta post that. And it was just a whole bunch of details about Ramp

and how- Abe at one point said, guys, I don't care about expense management software, please stop pitching me something to that effect. And we said, well, a lot of Ramp customers felt the same way at some point. Once they understood just how much time and money they could sit. We had so much fun with it. It was great.

Much fun. Thanks for thanks for being a good sport. Yeah, he was a good sport about it. Preference to always appear in suits, their visual trademark. Coogan gets his suits from a tailor whose identity he wouldn't reveal. Hayes likes a user, a New York based, I guess they're a brand now, but they are primarily a tailor. It's Laura Piana fabric. I guess me and Jamoth have that in common.

Watch peeking out from beneath the sleeve. Doxed, they doxed your watch. They doxed my watch. The suits are a little dig at Silicon Valley's preference for the informality of coto-pi, which is that how you pronounce that? I've never never heard that before Who can hopes they serve another purpose too. It's gonna make it easier to appeal to a public company CEO who's running TBPN Oh, we got single quotes now. We're upgrading. Oh, because inside double quotes. He still hit the car

I was so excited that we were halfway to have quotes. Yeah Single quotes the next halfway to no quotes. We were getting double quotes, and I remember us getting single quotes. The next thing's no quotes by his PR team that's maybe more conservative and more risk averse, he said. So when they pull up an example, they see a very clean package and everyone's in suits, and that's true.

I want to be a place where big public company CEOs can come on and it doesn't feel like we're disheveled not taking this seriously. It needs to be brand safe, even for big tech companies that want to, you know, uphold a very serious brand standard that they would feel comfortable on Bloomberg or CNBC. They should feel comfortable here as well. The external appearance.

He says, that's the external appearance at least. This is when he's putting us in the true zone. Putting us in the truth zone. internally the atmosphere is decidedly informal when the show wraps on the day one on the day I was at the Jonathan Club Kugin and Hayes casually stripped down to their boxers in front of me and the crew changing into t-shirts shorts pants and sneakers and then issued a few instructions on finishing the day's production and preparing for the next day's show

Well, he got us John. We're spits in there is We we do at times where normal clothes Waving goodbye to the guys we loaded into Hayes Mercedes Benz G wagon Wow He didn't even he didn't even say the most important part. There's an AMG. It's an AMG It's a G63. Yeah. Uh, it's a really important detail. Leaving that out, that feels intentional. Trying to take you down a peg. Could be a G550. Yeah. I like it though. It's more, it's more subtle. Yeah. Yeah, dude. He's just leaving it open. Could be any type of G wagon. Yep. And we, so we drove Abe over to Hollywood to see our new 4,000 square foot studio, uh, and we so we drove Abe over to Hollywood to see our new four thousand square foot studio

That we just signed a lease on Abe says it dwarfs the size of the current set they have in the Jonathan Club We are in a very small space on this set and they're looking forward to the increased flexibility It can give them including the ability to get up and walk around while streaming and basically screaming too. Yep right now We basically sit down for Three half hours we get up for like a minute in between but the energy So much better when we can stand it's gonna be great They'll also have the opportunity to host in-person guests something we're very excited about we have a bunch of people lined up and we Should be able to make those those in-person Sessions really special and I asked them about the dream bookings, of course. We've talked about this before.

Our dream bookings are the Magnificent Seven, like all of them. We want the CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, and Meta platforms, and Tesla. We want them all. The Thanos glove of technology leaders. We want them all on the show. So if you know someone who gets an introduction,

here's what could happen. I wanna hit the player horn for all of them. But we still have a lot to do on the production side. We want to be a fantastic show. We want their first appearance on TBPN to be memorable and cinematic and enjoyable. And I think, you know, and most importantly, I think it's less, and most importantly,

I think it's less about like asking like the hard hitting questions, it's more like, what are the questions that the investing community actually wants to hear? How can we dig through those and drive those questions that move markets? That's what's most important. And so the questions are less gotchas about random things that don't really matter to earnings, which is what a lot of the news has become in tech and business because the audience are not investors. We wanna focus on the questions

that investors actually care about, which is more often, how's CapEx looking? Which is like, is that a gotcha? Well, for some companies it might be. If their CapEx is looking is like is that a gotcha well for some companies it might be if the CapEx is looking rough it might be such as says we're happy to be leasers is that is hitting him with a question about his pivot away from data center build that's a gotcha like certainly not to a normal person who doesn't invest in the stock right but to someone who really cares and owns a

lot of Microsoft stock, it's probably pretty important. Anyway, it might be easy to design a show that would appeal to one or two of them, but it would be difficult to do one that could attract the entire set. They've all done podcasts, but there's no podcast that has done all seven, and says Coogan.

That's me. On the drive over, Hayes mentioned a dream prop for their Hollywood set. He and Coogan have already have a small gong in their Jonathan Club that they ring on the show when talking about a company's notable achievement, but he would like to buy an even bigger gong looking around at the Hollywood studio.

He could see how nice an extra large version might look. Yeah, we finally have the space bus. It's gone, he said. Oh, what a fun piece. Oh, I can't wait. We need a 50 foot by 50 foot gong that requires a group of people to stop it from ringing when you drive a car into the gong. We do.

We're working on it. What should we move on to? I mean, the main thing we have to cover. So yesterday, X was a nightmare. DMs weren't working for a lot of the day, which was rough for us on the show. Apparently there was literally a fire in the data center. Yeah, a fire broke out Thursday morning

at a data center in Hillsborough, Oregon, leased by Elon Musk's ex, forcing an extended response from emergency crews, according to multiple sources who spoke to Wired. The sources required anonymity, as they weren't authorized to speak publicly about the company. Firefighters arrived at Hillsborough Technology Park in a suburb west of Portland at 10 21 a.m. Man John Portland Oregon vandalism. You think this is you calling arson. I have no

idea. I don't even know how you how you vandalize or commit arson in the data center. They seem to be locked down. Yeah, but every time I see Portland in a headline in tech, it's some type of... This is pretty advanced stuff to figure out where the data centers are. Okay, I'm sorry. If you're an extremist and you wanna bring

a bunch of gasoline into a data center. Will Minaitis posted that whole thread about shooting the transformer and taking down all the electrical infrastructure and how you can basically take out the energy infrastructure with just small arms. So like an AR-15 shot at a transformer can take off a whole piece of the grid.

And so you would think that they'd go after that. I don't know. It's very, very, very odd. Hopefully they sorted out quickly. Yeah, so it's interesting. So before- I mean, Tesla's have been setting on fire. So maybe X data center is not there.

So this is interesting. So before Elon bought Twitter, the company had three data centers in Sacramento, Portland, and Atlanta. This ensured that if one data center went down, traffic could be shifted to the other two and split. So no single data center was overwhelmed around Christmas Eve, 2022 Musk shut down X's data center in Sacramento

in an effort to cut costs. The company experienced a major outage in the wake of the shutdown over the next six months. The company moved more than 2,500 server racks from the Sacramento facility to data centers in Portland and Atlanta. So it sounds like they have two core data centers now. Okay I want to rip through a bunch of stuff really quick. Let's just gonna rip through this stuff. So Donald Trump just

signed an executive order about nuclear and so we're gonna try and have some folks on very quickly and slot them in might be 230 but I'm talking to some nuclear folks about coming on and breaking it down I haven't even had a chance to read it yet but it's out apparently I don't know if you want to dig into that I also want to give you the final analysis on Apple's AI struggles we've been dipping our toe in and out of the story all week but Ben Thompson had a great summary of the problems with Apple's AI-ish, with Apple's AI strategy and he sums it up in these bullet points which are really rough.

One, Apple's head of software engineering didn't believe in AI. Apple's head of AI was skeptical about LLMs and chatbots. Apple's former CFO refused to commit sufficient funds for GPUs. Apple's commitment to privacy limited the company to purchased data sets instead of using like their own where meta and Google and YouTube are all highly valuable training sources. Apple's AI team is understaffed and the relative talent of an AI staffer still at Apple is uncomfortable to speculate about but given the opportunities elsewhere relevant. What should Apple do now?

The baseline advice from Ben Thompson is make Apple's on device models available to developers as an API without restriction. Make Apple's cloud interface, cloud inference available to developers as an API at cost. Allow Siri to be replaced by other AIs, perhaps for subscribers to those AIs who would revenue share with Apple. So you could bring Chetjiputti into the face of it. I bet for the access to the Siri button, Apple could get like 50%. 50%. Yeah.

Up from their typical bag. Yeah, and you just hold an auction. You just hold an auction and be like, hey, yeah, we're just not gonna hit this out of the park, so we're just gonna auction it off. It'd be great. They have precedent of selling the search bar, right? Yeah, we're just not gonna hit this out of the park, so we're just gonna auction it off. It'd be great. They have precedent of selling the search bar, right?

Why wouldn't they do? Anyway, the other news is people are now speculating about the exact device that Sam Altman and Johnny Ive will be building together at OpenAI with the IO acquisition for $6.5 billion. Swix, who's been on the show, says they literally copied Avi Schiffman, 6.5 billion for what Avi Schiffman built in the cave with a box of scraps. Quoting Iron Man of course and there's an old video from Avi pitching the first

friend and man I mean what a throwback I remember this. I was saying I think on Wednesday or Tuesday it was like, this could end up being extremely validating for Avi and Friend. If he ends up nailing, I mean, to be clear, he's also, I think, focused on a much different use case. I agree, I agree. Like Friend.com. I agree. He's building a companion.

But I mean, to be fair, the bear case for Friend is that they wind up in the same position as Pebble, which is that they do the discovery to find position as Pebble, which is that they do the discovery to find out that smartwatches are a good thing. And then Apple comes out with the Apple watch. They just leverage integration and it's just a much better product. And then Google doesn't didn't need to buy Pebble. They just created the Samsung Galaxy gear or whatever the Samsung watch. And And so the existing hardware manufacturers, they haven't had to buy companies.

And so they've wound up putting like a lot of the, there's not a winner in independent smartwatches. And so if there is a pioneering new format and OpenAI has a serious hardware product in the space, and then Apple copies it quickly, and then Samsung copies it quickly for the Android ecosystem, you're kind of left out to dry. So obviously I'm pulling for him and I hope he I hope he can wind up navigating it and counter positioning in a way that he creates

something that's truly disruptive but it is it is serious business right now. But Augusta sums it up sums it up while he says I have no stake in SF AI hardware but this seems right and it's the giant going up against Avi Schiffman and friend.com. So good luck to him. But yeah, the current prototype is slightly larger than the AI pin with a form factor as compact and elegant as an iPod shuffle.

One of the intended use cases is wearing it. Shuffle really was a magic product. Yeah. Were you two, were you kind of too mature for a shuffle? Hmm, I don't know if I ever had one, but I think it was more like a poverty problem. I don't think I had the money for it. But it was very much like an accessory.

Did it inspire you to grind? Yeah, I should have been grinding harder. But honestly, no, you know what it was? I was too much of a nerd. So I had something called like an iRiver, which was like a very unique thing. That like, it was technically more advanced than the iPod at the time.

Like I had one that had a color screen that you could watch movies on. It was like a two inch screen. And it was well before the iPod video came out by like a year. And so the release cycle was high, was faster and you'd get newer tech, but it was like borderline unusable because there was no focus on user experience.

And so the company wound up just not ripping. What else? Oh, Sam Altman, there's an exclusive in the Wall Street Journal by Berber Jinn, a quote in here about what he's planning here, and we just gotta read this one quote. Altman suggested that the $6.5 billion acquisition has the potential to add $1 trillion in value to OpenAI,

which is such an insane thing to say, it's so crazy. But at the same time, how much is Apple worth? If you get a play in that space, like yes, a trillion dollars of market cap is totally up for grabs. And so I think it sounds ridiculous, it sounds like over the top, but that really is the expected value.

And so when you think about it as like, what is that, a 0.6% or yeah, 0.65% chance at a trillion, probably worth 6.5 billion, right? In equity. And so that's the deal that they made was that, hey, we're gonna get this team that's gonna run really hard at this.

If they hit it, it's low probability, probably, you know, a couple percent chance that they pull it off. But if they do, it's a trillion dollars. So it's totally worth the high number. At least that's probably like, that's one way to do the discounted cashflow and like the valuation. And we've sliced and diced the 6.5 billion

a bunch of different ways and I think we both came away with this idea that like, it's not as crazy as it sounds. It's 2% of the company. You know, you're getting a great executive. You're getting a whole team. And like, it seems like a big number. They haven't shipped anything yet. That's crazy to buy something that doesn't even have

a product for 6 billion. But when you think about the market the opportunity things start piecing together and it could wind up looking very good in hindsight But who knows anyway, I don't think there's anything else we need to go into before we bring in our first guest We got Jory from linear. Let's bring him in. Let's bring him in How you doing? Hey guys, good for you. We're great. Good. Having fun, reading through the information, looking at the new Sam Altman IO acquisition.

Have you, do you have a take on the new device? What do you want to see in the world of AI hardware? I don't know, to be honest. Let's see when things start shipping and how things evolve. Yeah. Have you had a chance to play with them? It's great to see. I, again, like, you know, like driver's seat on the news, like doing interviews and so on.

So I think it's like, I had a break from, for like, whatever, like four years or like, so it's been a while. Yeah, John called out. It was like very strategic to go have him do a big interview at Stripe Sessions and then immediately the next week come in with this massive announcement. But I'm excited to see, I think, every technology. Call that a coincidence in my parts.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think every technology enthusiast will benefit from him taking a real crack at that AI. What else in the news this week? It's been kind of an informal AI week over here at TBPN between Microsoft Build, Google I.O., OpenAI I.O. Linear agents.

Linear agents and Anthropic Clawed 4 dropping. What's been most interesting to you? What are you most excited to leverage? Pretty bad week for me for following the news. This is finished up moving, so I have actually been relatively off news. I've been on the docket for a long weekend to start catching up more on all the keynotes and so on. But I don't know, it's good stuff having more agents,

or it's really coding agents and like different like players like coming to the space. So I feel like it's, it will be like interesting to see like over next couple of weeks, kind of like what like performs like how well and also like, what kind of like user experiences are gonna be there. Because I feel like that's kind of like the bit that we're like at linear like now falling much more

as we're like also, you know, trying to like work with like different players and like integrate stuff into linear is like, what are like the patterns of like usage that will happen with this? Yeah, what's more important? What's just vague definitions around user experience patterns for agents versus standards like MCP and more technical advances?

Yeah, I mean, like those are like very two different things. I feel like, you know, like MCP and like open standards, like that's like personally, I'm like very, very like pro of course, as an engineer. But it's been something like, I feel like know if we can like last in like last decade of like the big platforms owning more and more on their own, like trying to hoard everything. But like now things are pretty much like being pushed out in the open and people are like, companies are like,

almost like forced to cooperate in the new world. There's just so much demand. And it's been interesting to see from our side too, there's large companies jumping very early and a whole space is pushing all the companies to act fast. Let's see how much hot air will come out of it, but I think overall, it's like push for openness is good. But then, yeah. Yeah, so for Linear's agent's product, how do you evaluate, how open is the product? If somebody's building an agent,

can they build an integration with Linear by themselves? Or are you guys really kind of doing your own internal testing to kind of qualify potential partners there? Yeah, we're kind of doing your own internal testing to kind of qualify potential partners there? Yeah, we're kind of looking more on the promotional side, I would say. We believe in open APIs and trying to have people access, but they're not like that when it comes to security

and these kind of things. It comes more on what do you promote? Sure. Yeah, I mean, at the same time, like if I get a really amazing agent that just can puppeteer my mouse and keyboard, you can't really do anything about that. Maybe you throw up a Captcha,

but agents are gonna be able to solve those pretty quickly. And so at a certain point, you have to think like, like you're, you know, there's a reason why you have an API. There's a reason why you have an MCP server. There's a reason why you have an API. There's a reason why you have an MCP server. There's a reason why you have maybe an agent integration, but are these like temporary steps in your mind? Or do you think that there's real durable value to, um, an agent, like a standardization, something that you build in house,

some sort of protocol or some, or standardizing against things versus just, MCP, I kept coming back to like, can't the LLMs, if they're really so smart, can't they just use websites? But what's your take on that trend? Yeah, it probably comes down to like the user experience that you want to like offer. So you know, like, uh, controlling a computer or like a VM or whatever, like that's the kind of ultimate like band-aid to like everything, like it allows to do everything, but it's still like, it's not purpose built,

but like MCP to a degree is like a little bit like similar. It's just like a way to like do like, do request response, like calls and get the information in, like share that. But then it's more about, I don't like, in our mind is like, what is the experience like inside the product that like you can offer that maybe is like specific to a product and how that does, how does that work?

Like today, like our implementation is like, you know, somewhat like rudimentary that we would expect, like agents look like regular users, our implementation is somewhat rudimentary that we would expect. Agents look like regular users, but it's not very exciting to see the progress of the agent when they're posting new comments in the thread. That's a little bit of a hack that you have to live without, while we still see what's actually like required

and like what can we like build to like better like support like the agent developers, like what's my like experience like give them. Of course, like we're, you know, like looking at this from the lens of like linear, of course, like running the company, like building the product, but it's also like, it also interesting to see how the...

Where does the invocation of agents happen? Is it like your CLI? Is it like a text editor? Is there some kind of web tool or a desktop app? Of course, for us, it's pretty natural being close to where you work, so integrating into that workflow. And I feel like that's pretty natural like being like close to like where you work. So like integrating into that workflow. And I thought that's why a lot of like these like smaller companies, especially a lot of are pretty excited to like build in linear because they're already using linear themselves. What agent gets the heaviest usage internally

at linear today? I think it's been like a couple of the coding agents, but those were like the first ones to, you know, to the market. No, I mean, I mean not even, I mean specifically like your team at Linear. Yeah. Like coding agents or, or.

Well, you know, I kind of like mentioning names because like, of course we're, we don't have a horse in the race. We're sort of the interface for this? I love horse races and I love having horses in races. Yeah. Pick a horse. I know.

But it's changing every week. So like you said, there's a lot of new agents that came out this week from Google and OpenAI and so on. So it'll be interesting to see how those play out. And we're looking for, working with all of them, of course. But I don't want beyond, currently the focus is a lot on just coding agents. Like it's natural because there's a lot of value

to be created over there. But I think we'll, in the next couple of months, we'll start seeing much more non-coding agents augmenting alongside with the coding agents. So you might have a task where you have a feature flagging agent, coding agent, and I don't know, who knows, a marketing agent helping you out, write the change log blog posts and so on. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh,

are there any other AI features that you're implementing that feel like windsurf or cursor for project management? Like something that like lives in linear alongside, but it's not that asynchronous because in coding we're seeing a lot of like there's synchronous AI and there's asynchronous AI and these two, two different patterns. And it feels like the, it feels like the market's bifurcating, but no investors want to admit that because they want to say it's going to be winner take all. But in fact, we're seeing two different paradigms kind of emerge or maybe in three different paradigms emerge. What are you seeing on the project management side? Yeah, that's yeah, I don't like the agents are roughly,

as probably in our case, are tied to issues or tasks. And that's kind of like the interface for them. Outside that, we're all, of course, like linear is not only like issue tracking tool. It's like for project management, like organizing like your work at the company level, not only like individual level. So, and that's where like have a separate work stream

of we're building our own like AI tooling around that. How can we augment the project managers and like the product leaders? So like do their work better? And that you could like imagine looking a little bit more like a Claude or cursor or cursor alongside your linear data. And with that, it's gonna be interesting to see how we can start introducing the external agents

or MCPs as part of that. That of course the issues is that's the first step because they're much more natural. What's your team's approach to testing new, for example, coding agents, right? It's in many ways like the linear approach from my perspective is, you know, really thoughtful, ideally long term planning around building, you know, beautiful products and taking a calm approach to doing this. And in that way, enabling other people

to maybe have more calm, effective product development. But at the same time, testing new tools, they can be super effective, but testing new tools can also be super distracting. We don't do a ton of engineering on TBPN. We actually do a surprising amount back office stuff to automate production. But I can imagine an environment where you have,

call it 50 engineers, and on any given day, one of them can send a message into Slack, hey, guys, you've got to check this out. It's amazing, blah, blah, blah. And maybe they just got, one of them can send a message into Slack. Hey guys, you got to check this out. It's like amazing. Blah, blah, blah. Maybe they just got like a couple of good results and it's actually not worth directing everyone's energy to, but at the same time you want to stay at the edge. But do you have a philosophy or kind of an internal ethos around testing new tools? Uh, not really.

I think like mostly comes from people themselves. Uh, we're not like enforcing like certain tools. We're of course encouraging a couple of tools where we can maintain security and those kinds of things. We're a mature company at this point. So we need to look after our customers' information and a lot of it also lives inside linear. So we need to look after stuff.

But when it comes to like new tools, the team is like looking at the news the same way we are and like trying out stuff. And I think it's a little bit more, so you put out like linear ways, a little bit more calm. And I think that also shows on the tool adoption and so on. Like you're like excited like to try out stuff, but like, you know, you take it with a grain of salt instead of like going on Twitter and like blasting, like we've replaced like all of our team, like with AI.

I mean, like that's one way to do it, but that's definitely not us. Yeah. Nothing against that either, but yeah. The Klarna method. Not naming any names. I said it, I said it. I respect it. It Klarna method. Not naming any names. I said it, I said it. I respect it.

It's good marketing. It's good marketing, but it's not for everyone. Yeah, I don't know, like that's being like overall, like when it comes to developing AI tools, like we started like when, like everyone else started like a couple of years back when like the first GPTs like came out and I tried to do stuff and like, you know, tried

to build a chatbot and so on. Like, but I don't like very early on, like we realized like, well, you get to like whatever 60 70%, but like then it's like falls apart. The experience and like it's not. And then it's really like hard to figure out like what's actually have to to get to the 95% where you want to be. This is the Apple problem. Linear and Apple have similar sort of

desires for perfection, right? And generative AI is, in many ways, completely imperfect, right, and unreliable. So that's an interesting challenge. Yeah, but we built a few things. We shipped a few things. We didn't make like maybe like the biggest fuss about it. We're not the AI powered like issue tracking software

raising like gazillion like dollars. But now- Raising a lot of customers though. Yeah, yeah. And you know, I mean, like in the end, like, they they want to get their work done. And like, do they want to like buy hype or do they want to like buy product? Maybe today, like you want to like buy more like AI and that's where we're seeing like a lot of like demand for AI solutions. And like now we're heavily investing in that. Like, and that kind of like our, we did a course correction over like the last,

like roughly six months ago, when I think like the tools has got so much better. Like for me personally, I was like, I'm currently a lead, a lead on like the one, the deep seek, like came out and like just trying like the thinking mode was this like the light bulb moment. Like I think a little bit background on that.

I think just because of like linear philosophy is like try to build really like, you know, snappy like purposeful tools. Like we always like chase the millisecond and like try to get something like really fast. And when it comes to like LLMsLMs, you have inherent latency to it. So it just felt like, how do we bind this weight into the product that's instant?

And I think now with the new thinking modes and so on, that's just changed the user, what people expect, like that paradigm. And now we can build towards that. And people expect to take a little bit more time. And also like more UI patterns to support that. But like you get a lot of value out of it. Totally.

Well, yeah, check out some of Google's launches from earlier this week. What was it? They were doing 3,000 tokens in like half a second. With the diffusion models? Yeah. Very cool. Anyways, this was awesome. Congratulations on the launch this week

and come back on again soon. Yeah, hopefully. Cheers. Later, Jory. Talk to you soon. We got Zach Weinberg coming into the studio and we also have Doug Bernhauer from Radiant joining at 2 30 to talk about the nuclear. I'm very excited about.

Welcome to the stream, Zach. How you doing? I'm good. Welcome to the stream. Full soundboard now. Full soundboard. We're getting better every single day. Constant iteration.

What other product updates have there been since I was last here? Oh, I mean, our Chirogs. Yeah. Stop asking about, stop asking hard questions about our updates. We're doing fine. I noticed a sponsor,

whoever makes the yellow drink, I assume. Oh, no. To be honest. They're not sponsoring us. To be honest, I know I noticed what sponsor whoever makes the yellow drink I assume To be honest I Did grow up in the town that this company is from we have no proper affiliation We should just wrap these in ramp yellow Anyways good to see you. Yeah., good to see you guys. Thanks for having me.

I mean, we wanted to have you on initially to talk about the most favored nation, drug pricing, EO. It's been a week or two since then. There was kind of like, I think it dropped Sunday. It felt like years ago. But I mean, it felt like Sunday, like, oh, this is going to be Black Monday for biotech. It didn't happen.

The biotech stocks did fine. They also this was coinciding with the pullback on the tariffs broadly. So the market rose overall. Can you give us how you process the information, how you're thinking about it now? Does this thing matter? Should we even be talking about it? Should we just move on? Yeah. Maybe let's start with like,

why it's probably just like a misguided idea in the first place. Please. Or at least the trade that I think Americans would need to understand that you're making and as it relates to drug pricing. And what I think we may have talked about this last time or I've talked about this with a lot of people,

like the idea that America pays a lot for new therapeutics, right? And we do, we do by the way, like this idea that we pay materially more, even on like a GDP adjusted basis than other countries and in particular other wealthy countries. So you take Europe as probably like the best example where the amount that we spend on new therapies as a percentage of our like it was called GDP adjusted price. Sure, if you will, is still on the upper bound. So like America pays for the innovation for the rest of the world. But don't we don't we don't we get the innovations like five to 10 years faster

than the rest of the world? We definitely get them faster. We are usually the first place all these new drugs launch. There's also a set of therapies that we have that you just cannot get anywhere else. Like the other countries refuse to pay for them. It's socialized medicine, right? So it's like a single budget.

And then there's also the factor of the rebates where the headline price that you see quoted in America is not what Americans typically pay even if they don't have insurance so you might see that some like Alzheimer's drug is 10 times or for a hundred times the headline price in America versus Japan but realistically Americans are paying three times more five times more Which is still a lot, but yeah, it's not it's not the scary number that people often quote personally I like I like paying more for drugs because it inspires me to grind harder. Yeah Caffeine, nicotine, creatine, protein, testosterone.

Protein, yeah, full just TRT juicing before the show. Yeah. No, so like, would you pay more? Was where I was going. On a net basis, like when you add in all the discounts that are given out, it's not as bad as it makes it seem. But obviously, like when you read about it in the headlines and they're like, oh, this drug is like $65,000 a year,

$150,000, that is the list price. And so the media doesn't understand net pricing versus list pricing. And so the headlines are much more sensational than they actually are in reality. But yes, the delta still does exist. And we do pay more. Now, part of the reason why we pay more

is because if we don't do it, the drugs don't exist. Yeah. And I just think that little piece of this is really hard for most people to understand, which is like biotech. There's this really amazing analysis that was done by RA Capital, which is like a giant biotech venture fund.

And people like this. Yeah, we had one of their principles on the I think the Monday after Super sharp group top five, you know do mostly publics but like this is like a you know, expert expert expert group in therapeutics Yeah, we have a test Cameron on yeah, I have like a hundred people their founder Peters is super sharp We respect them a lot. They actually were investors in one of our company's next rounds. Anyway, good group. They did a very beautiful analysis of the expected value of a biotech investment at various rounds.

Seed round, A round, B round, so on and so forth. Like what is the EV of a dollar that you put in? And I will tell you that at both seed and series A, the EV is negative negative at our current prices and the reason for this is like drug discovery is the single hardest fucking problem that you will ever encounter in your life because you are trying to make a drug and using all of these tools that are not actually the human being until the absolute end of it.

So you have to take all this insane amount of risk and spend tons and tons of money. And the data that you have to make your decisions are like in a Petri dish or in a mouse or in a monkey or in a dog. And like, yes, that's useful, but it's not a human. And so like the amount of companies where, because you don't see this in tech, right?

You don't see companies that have raised $300 million, do one product launch, and then go bankrupt. Yeah. And like that happens all the time in biotech. That's actually like the norm is basically, you know, you've spent a few hundred million dollars, you think this thing is possibly going to work, it works in a dog, it works in a monkey, whatever. The drug-like properties seem all really great, and then you'd run a human clinical trial for $150 million. And it doesn't work. And the company's bankrupt.

And everybody loses their money. And it's not like 20 million. It's like a hundreds. So biotech is an expected value negative investment business, even at current prices. And so what that means is like that's just a power law thing where where the best about biotech venture funds are doing great at seed and series a and just like you know, there's plenty of funds that I could point to in consumer SAS or enterprise SAS that are

Terrible and negative EV, right? I don't think I don't think you could point to the asset class being negative even true true true, right? Like yes, there's always a skew in the results, but here we're talking about the the asset class being negative. Even true, true, true. Right. Like, yes, there's always a skew in the results. But here we're talking about the entire asset class is negative. And so if you're on the front end of it, great. Yeah, like, you know, you stick it in the middle, you lose money. Yeah.

In tech, I don't think you get the median fund in tech and you lose money. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. So you guys might be like one and a half acts or something. Exactly. Like doing something. So it's not shifted this way. Yeah, the whole category. Why is it shifted this way? There's a bunch of reasons the biggest one in my opinion has to do with this concept of called like better than the Beatles

Which is basically like It's a very simple idea when it clicks for you. Mm-hmm when I try to launch a new drug The thing that I have to beat in terms of its efficacy, how good of a drug is it, is the current standard of care, meaning what a patient would get if this drug didn't exist. So it's not placebo. In most cases, it's not like a water sugar pill, right? It's like the current thing. And so as we get better at treating the current thing, the bar gets higher. So it actually, the better we do at drug thing, the bar gets higher. So it actually like the better we do a drug discovery, it gets

harder, not easier. We should do that with payroll software unless you're better than the best payroll software. You shouldn't be allowed to promote your product. Well, even more like here's the crazy. You shouldn't be allowed to launch. You shouldn't be allowed. Here's the analogy.

You wouldn't be allowed to launch the product. Okay, the government would say no, no, no, no, you cannot launch until you are better than the current. Your corporate card isn't better than ramps. So you can't launch. Could you imagine that world where you're like, Oh, my new, you know, someone who launched like that? Oh, yeah, of course, chat GPT search engine. And then like the federal government's like, no, Google's better. You can't do this. Yeah, that don't know. Yeah, of course. Chat GPT search engine, and then like the federal government's like, no, Google's better.

You can't do this until you're better. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is how biotech works. Wow. That is how biotech works. And by the way- Wait, is that the right way for it to work? Does that contribute? You have to imagine it contributes to prices being high

because it's somewhat anti-competitive, right? If I, in the payroll market, right? Like a payroll platform gets super bloated. Some founders like, and it costs $100 an employee. Some founder comes in, launches an okay version. Also there's just less iteration on drugs I would imagine than on software, right? No, no, you can't like iterate through it.

There's no learning. You got to like it either is better or not. Here's the problem. Are you going to take the drug that's 30% worse but 50% cheaper even though you don't pay for it? Absolutely not. Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. Now, if you were on the hook or maybe you saw some of the rebates and went into your pocket, maybe you'd be like, all right, my psoriasis isn't that bad. I'll take the 30% less effective drug and I'll clip some coupons. But we don't do that because in America, we view health care as like it's supposed to be free for everybody. And so we kind of do it with over-the-counter stuff.

If you get the mucine X extra strength max, it might be $3 more than just generic stuff. Try telling the cancer patient that you're going to get the slight difference. Absolutely. You're just not going to do it. And so the FDA is kind of like, well, the bar is current standard of care.

That's the standard we've put in place. Look, if we wanted to create a system where you could launch slightly worse drugs cheaper, like that would be an interesting system, but the problem is the people using the drugs aren't the one paying for the drugs, at least not directly. And so cheaper doesn't win, right? Like you can't shift, because the patient

at the end of the day does not want the worst drug. Like I can't even, there's so many end of the day does not want the worst drug like I can't even I can't There's so many Situations where you're just like absolutely not especially in serious disease chronic disease cancer all the stuff that really matters So going all the way back to pricing One of these like weird weird issues in biotech is simply like as the industry gets better It gets harder not easier, which is there's almost like no other industry where that is true. Yeah. And so the opposite learning curve pricing, it's like the opposite of fabs,

the opposite of software, the opposite of that. Yeah. When you see all these stats of like innovation and biotech has slowed and all, you know, a lot of it is because of this and they call it better than the Beatles, which is this idea of like, imagine if you wanted to release music and the only way it would work is if you were better than the Beatles, cause that's the best. And so like, imagine if you wanted to release music and the only way it would work is if you were better than the Beatles, because that's the best. And so like, how much music would you really have?

And that's the, I like the phrase, because it, whatever, catchy, like the Beatles. Anyway, so. It does, the one thing I'll say is it has an interesting effect of pushing for true excellence. Right? Yeah, yeah, I mean, basic people are. That certainly doesn't happen in SaaS. of pushing for true excellence, right? Like that does not happen. That certainly doesn't happen in SaaS. There's a lot of people that see a good SaaS product

and they're like, I can make an okay version of that and make a couple million dollars a year. There's less cynicism and there's less like, we don't have a slop problem in farming. Well, there's no, and there's no like move fast and break things because you can't tweak your way to the front. Right. You've got to build the best drug before you put it into people. Right. There is no tweaking.

So I say all of this, which is to say like, yes, drugs are expensive in the United States. But like if you wanted cheaper drugs today, you are basically not going to get any in the future. And I know everyone's like, oh, that's not true. But like, I am on the front lines of this every single day. I mean, we are one of now one of the larger biotech venture funds at seed, meaning like we take the most we're in that negative EV category. There's no different risk on They might feel different. Risk on. Risk on. Yeah, yeah.

And so if the price on the other side is not big enough for the risk that you take, it's not that you like tone it down. It's that you just don't do it. Yeah, I mean, just to be very clear, like you don't need to do this, right? Like you could walk away from the game, right? And yeah, like there's a certain point where- And by the way, it's not just me. It's our investors,

our LPs. Like if my fund and every other biotech and early stage investor can't make money, our job will cease to exist because our investors won't let us exist, right? Like there's this, oh, money will always be there. No, absolutely not. And so, you need a reward on the other side of it.

And I think that trade is really hard for people to think about because you're like, well, it's a lot now. And you're like, yeah, it's a lot now. But if it weren't, that means 10 years from now, you're going to have the same drugs available in 10 years as we have today. Your kids are not going to be any better off from a medicine perspective. So the reward does have to be really big. But at the same time, like, do the Europeans kind of preload off of us?

Yes. And so this kind of rough idea of, all right, what they're trying to do is say, we're going to index the US price to a basket of comparable international countries, basically wealthy first world countries, mostly European countries, and that we can't be like materially higher than they are on a GDP adjusted basis.

At least that's the idea behind the executive order. Maybe two thoughts. One, this will not take US drug prices down. It will not happen. What will happen, this is not a good thing, is it may force. First of all, this is likely not enforceable. I don't believe the legally.

I don't think the EO works. And that's part of why you didn't see the biotech market react is every expert. Seriously. Yeah. Like it's not there's no it'll fail on the court a thousand times. It'll never get implemented. That doesn't mean some future version of this. There isn't some like loophole or whatever that maybe the government slowly figures out.

But this EO seems as if it's basically never gonna happen. What about the, is biotech being squeezed on both sides in some way right now, given that there's kind of an attack on the fundamental foundational research as well? And so if you take that, basically that's like investment that's sort of like, you know, non-effectively, the biotech industry gets the benefit of. Yeah, like the negative EV bets are already being subsidized to be closer to zero, but

not negative. Yeah, this administration is doing absolutely everything it can to destroy the future of therapeutics that you want. Every single decision they've made, basically, so far, has been negative to future medicines existing. You cut biology research, so we don't really understand what drives disease. You cut skilled immigration.

Do you know who is like half of biotech? If you go to any biotech company's website, you go to R, usually somewhere between 30 and 50% of the people on staff are foreign born. Because you know who like doesn't want to do the 17 years of school to become a chemist and like do all the training? Americans.

And so, you know, we already have a skilled scientist shortage and that's even with current immigration. And so like kicking these people out of the country, not letting them come here in the first place to train, like we're just gonna have a massive, you know, skills gap. This isn't like bring manufacturing back. This is like you need to be a PhD in chemistry plus 15 years. Like these people don't exist. And so most of our senior team at Curie is foreign born. Yeah. And I imagine that I imagine that the biotech industry could very quickly absorb like twice the amount of PhDs and just do more research, right? And it's not as it wouldn't be like job displacement if that happened.

So the solution and like biology and chemistry, PhDs and proteins, like specific types of PhDs. You know, do we need like marine science PhDs? Yeah. But you know. So I don't want to put words in your mouth, but are you saying the solution is that we need a million Brian Johnsons? Yeah. We're looking for scientists, not crazy people.

So, you know, no, we need, we need a million, you know, David Lu's at MIT. Yeah. What about, what about that guy in China, Ho Jong Kui? Have you been following this guy? He is the one that cast himself on himself? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And he posts these like very vague posts where it sounds like- I thought it was an AI meme account for months. And he keeps posting like, you know, biotechnology should never be used to create super soldiers. And it's just like a selfie of him. And it's like, it sounds like you're making a super soldier, man. And it's unclear how much he's in on the joke.

But recently, he got married and his wife can't get into the country. Have you been tracking that story at all? No, because it's like fringe. It's like the New York Post of Science. Yeah. What about? I want to go back. Please.

Because I just like this is the class. This is this administration being like, I'm angry about something. And then I make a decision back. Please, please, please. Because I just like this is the class. This is this administration being like, I'm angry about something. And then I make a decision and nobody thinks about then what happens. And it's like over and over again. You're like, these are these fucking people are so stupid. And I hope they're listening. Like, you are all so stupid.

And like, you're just fired. You're just ruining the thing that has made America excellent in science by killing all these things in science funding, immigration, blah, blah, blah. It's like it is idiotic. But even if you say like we're going to index the US price to international prices, remember that the United States is a giant fucking country. If 350 million people were the wealthiest in the world, like all 50% of farmer revenue comes from the United States. And then you like Japan is kind of second. Okay, so now put yourself in the shoes of a farmer company.

All right, you're going to index our price to the European price. And let's say the Europeans are like 15% of your revenue and the Americans are 50. Are you going to lower your price? Absolutely not. You're going to raise the European price. Yeah. Right. And just to bring it up, because you can't lose the US revenue.

Yep. So you'll never give this revenue up. So the US price will not change. This does not work. All it does is it may, even if it were illegal, it may force pharma to bring its European price up. And you know what happens when that happens? Because this is like, and then what?

The Europeans will go, OK, we can't pay for it. We're not going to buy it. And all it does is it keeps the US price the same and it shrinks pharma. Like the net net is the United States will pay exactly the same that we paid before, because pharma is not going to drop price in its largest category by far. It's the only place you can make money in pharma is in the US. So that price not coming down. If you have to bring the price

externally up, it shrinks the revenue in that market, which shrinks pharma, which shrinks biotech. Because if pharma is a smaller dollar value, if the profitability of pharma comes down, you know what they stop doing? Buying biotech companies, right? All of this, the same effect, which is like, well, if this is less profit,

it's just a different way of making it less profitable. Right? It's the same thing of us, the same effect, which is like, well, if this is less prof, it's just a different way of making it less profitable, right? It's the same thing of like, if it's less profitable, I can't take as much risk. And if I can't take as much risk, I stop doing risky drug discovery and therefore the whole industry just kind of like this. And that's not a win. How do companies get valued if they have one drug

that's like working and maybe it's the best, right? So it's actually able to be in the market. Yet there's a sort of sense that there are very real competitors that might come in with a drug that is substantially better. Like how is a pharma company that's exploring M&A gonna value that? Is it still the same?

This is what they do all day. What you just described is exactly what these people are spending teams and teams of people on, which is like, okay, what is the value of the current drug that we've got? Which is usually if it's at the place where it's approved, you're looking at, you know, what are the peak sales and how long am I gonna be able, how long is at, you know, say, what are the peak sales? And how long am I going to be?

How long is my patent? Right? What do we what do we expect generic competition to come to look like? And then you're looking at the pipeline of competitors, and you're looking at the data that they shared. And sometimes there's some data, and sometimes there isn't. And then you're trying to predict the future, which is like, okay, just because you know, company access working on a competitor doesn't mean it's gonna work. So do we think it's gonna work? So do we think it's gonna work?

Why do we think it's gonna work? If it does work, what are the, she do like scenario planning, like, okay, 10% chance this beats us, 50% chance it doesn't, like, should we be concerned? And all of this math goes into the spreadsheet of like, what do we think this drug is worth? And what's the risk appetite?

So like, this is day to day, biotech pharma commercial analysis, there are very, very smart people who do this. You know, this is what the public hedge funds is what the RA guys will do, you know, and it's deep science. But all of it is just like, at least the drug pricing stuff is just it's a trade that is hard for people to understand, but it's kind of like, if you don't put a reward on a very risky thing, the risky thing doesn't happen, and you just don't feel it until 10 years.

You won't even really know because it's the drug that never got started in the first place. And then eventually what you're doing is you're outsourcing all of this to China, because the Chinese will pick it up and do we have a longer conversation about China? So all of it is just kind of like stupid. The other thing I would say, I don't have to jump, but like this is my defense of medicine and therapeutics, if you will, as like a great investment. They go generic.

Yeah, like nine to 12 years, let's say roughly, these are generic, which means they are basically free for you in 10 years. I know your kids and your grandkids and your future kids. Like it is an unbelievable investment. You pay a lot upfront, you get a lot of innovation, a lot of people taking risks. You have this like window in time, which is like, yeah, you know, you got to eat it.

You're going to pay a bunch for it. It's not going to feel great. And then everybody gets it free. There is no other industry in the world where that happens. And even within health care, you know, doesn't go generic. Doctors, hospitals, surgeries, like why? Why? Why is there so much focus on the therapeutic, which is also only about 10% of medical spending is drugs,

which then eventually goes generic versus the 90% of it, which is basically physicians. And those physicians, they're not, you know. It's the margins, right? What strikes you as something that, like the pill only costs a cent to make. And so, just emotionally you think about high margin things as wasteful.

What's something positive that could come from the EO? We had a infamous health care exec actually. Actually, no, we had an infamous health care exec message us while we're live. Said ask him if he reads that the EO is maybe trying to solve the consumer pricing problem gross to net rather than actually making pricing comparable in the end, given

that there was a specific call out for consumer D to C pricing and which might have been why. Consumer D to like, health care is about the new drugs that are really expensive, not like consumer D to C pricing of like, you know, whatever consumer medicine, like I'm talking about real health care, very sick, chronic disease people with neurological conditions with with cancer, with heart disease, like the serious stuff, which is a company that they'll give me one pill that has a dysfunction, medicine and hair loss medicine in one pill. Is that not real medicine? What's going on? Those are generic meds. Sounds like amazing.

It's amazing. And you know why they're so cheap? Yeah, because they're generic. Because 15, 20 years ago we invented this shit. We, you know, Pfizer made like a crap ton of money selling Viagra. Yeah, that's right. Everybody. Now you get to get your six in one dick pill. And like, that's a pretty cool deal, deal right like it's cheap and all this like shores there's some like roasts and net whatever That's not what health care is. That's not I'm sorry like hair loss is not health care. Mm-hmm Interesting what about crisper on demand? There was this this infant child that was saved with a custom gene therapy. It seemed

like a very inspiring story. There was an inspiring video all about it. It seems like an amazing testament to something we've been hearing about for a long time, which is CRISPR. Maybe a decade we've been talking about this. Is that an opportunity for new companies? Is that is there already a company that's like ripping on the back of this? Or is that just kind of like an outgrowth of what we'd expect with the technology given the maturity I believe the company that did this was beam therapeutics is that them we did it yeah yeah it's cool this is I mean this is a perfect example right which is like that I think it's being I got a camera I'll hand which one

it is they that company that it's B I got a camera I'll hand which one it is they that company that that successfully developed this this therapeutic is trading for less than money raised. Well, wow. Okay. Breakthrough. Right. And why? Well, because like these gene editing technologies where you're going after essentially disease that is very clearly defined by some mutation in your DNA and that's a small subset of total disease. It's very, very rare conditions that this applies to. So the market, the way I think about it is the patient market for this technology is very small. These are horrible diseases that in theory can be treated through gene editing.

There's not that many of them, but you can do some really amazing things if you can make these edits, which is the first time this has ever happened. But if you add up the patient population of all of these conditions where you could possibly do this, it's not that many. I don't know the math offhand. I bet you it's probably like tens of thousands at most. Okay? Plus the variable cost of manufacturing this stuff on a per patient basis can be hundreds of thousands of dollars Just we're gonna get some blockbuster gene editing for hair loss, and then we're back in business

No Is not you know, there's no like one base edit to you know fix hair loss, but yeah Yet, I think I think like's techno pessimist on my stream. Well, one of the things you learn as you go into science is that the DNA is not actually the whole story. It's not even close to the whole story. And so like it's not even you wouldn't say there's is vibes a part of it. Is that it's actually astrology.

Yeah. OK. Taking the DNA, but also the astrological sign. Infamous astrologist. I mean, vibes are kind of like it in a way that your behavior as you're alive does affect your gene expression. Epigenetics are the vibes of the DNA. Your epigenetics matter, right?

You sit in smoke all day, you're going to have some problems. Anyway, I like this as an example, because this company that just made this like unbelievable breakthrough is has never been done before in humans. They're curing diseases is now trading for basically less than cash raised. I got to go find the answer to the first. So there's a, I just got an answer. So this was a bespoke CRISPR based editing drug.

It was built and tested by physician scientists at the children's hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine with translational help from Innovative genomics Institute at UC Berkeley reagents and GMP grade components were donated by several suppliers including accutas therapeutics and integrated DNA technologies and Aldver on Both Dana her companies got for guide RNA. Yes. On that one, there was another story. Yes, there was another story and I have to find it. Well, we will have to we have to work hard, but we'd love to have you back and kind of dig into some of these other biotech

companies and take us through the wins and losses. I think it'd be very interesting to see. By the way, imagine if that becomes a drug and we go, oh, we can only pay $20,000 for it. Do you know what happens to that drug? Sits on the shelf. Sits on the shelf, no one ever does it. No one ever makes it.

And there's your drug pricing in reality, which is like, it's gotta be a reward. So we're pro higher drug prices, I guess. You piled us on that? We want the highest price as possible is what I'm hearing. You want to you'll get a lot of shit. You put real high prices like people will come and take risk. I'm sure there's some balance. We got to have Scrooge Scrooge on together.

We need like, here's my favorite set. My first set. I'll pull these for you. So I want to sound like an asshole just like spitting numbers that aren't true. I believe on a per American basis, like you take our drug spend and you divide it essentially over like, you know, Americans, we spend drugs on.

It's something like a thousand dollars a year or so per person. If you will. We spend more on cosmetics than we do on medicine. Wow. More on cosmetics. It's here for America. We're looking good. What about fast food? What about fast food? cosmetics than we do on medicine. Wow. More on cosmetics. Let's hear it for America. We're looking good. What about fast food? What about fast food?

We might be dropping dead at 45, but we're going to look good doing it. Thanks so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Always a pleasure. Cheers. Next up, we have Lee Marie Braswell from Kleiner Perkins coming in. Former colleague of mine at Founders Fund, briefly. Excited to talk to her about artificial intelligence, AI agents, all the news of the day,

and we'll bring her in. And we got some good chyrons for her coming up. We'll see if we can get them up on the stream. What are we talking for her? The term she tyrant herself. Lee Marie, are you there? Can you hear me? How you doing? Oh, what's up, Kugin?

How's it going? It's good. What's new with you? I'd love to get your initial take on AI Week. We got Microsoft Build, Google I.O., Open AI I.O. We got Claude Four from Anthropic. It's been a massive week. What has stuck out to you as like the most interesting,

the most underrated, the most worth digging into of the news of the week? Well, I guess just to start off and it's so good to see you again. It's been a while. It's been too long. Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah. There's never a dull moment really. I feel like every day there's something really significant that you need to be paying attention to if you're going to try to make money investing in AI companies. Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, I think the big thing that's actually there's so much this week. I mean, you know, starting with some of the stuff you said, the best time to be a technology podcaster. Investors close second, but podcasters really where you want to be. That's where the

action is, because every day there's new news anyway Yeah, what is sticking out to you? Hey, Jordy? Um, hey There's um, I mean the IO acquisition in particular that news what incredible video what an incredible team I mean just really showcasing open a eyes ambition to really you know Get into get into a lot of stuff And I mean obviously there's a lot of speculation about what the device will look like. I was actually looking at some of the- My favorite, sorry to interrupt,

my favorite part was John and I are, I guess, ex hall monitors. We're in the Community Notes program. And so somebody was trying to community note the OpenAI launch video, and the suggested community note was, this video uses AI. These two scenes aren't real.

If you look at this section, it's like you're trying to gotcha an AI company for using AI in a marketing video. Like, what is this? That's very silly. What do you expect, you know? Yeah, that's kind of the point. Yeah. Yeah.

So I mean, yeah, I mean, super excited about what potentially that could imply for just OpenAI's ambitions, especially as it relates to consumer hardware. I was looking it up on 03, but 03 kept then kind of giving me some different answers. But it might be, and to be fair, I don't kind of know the current state of things inside of IO, John AI's company, but it might be one of the largest, if not the largest, sort of pre-product acquisition of all time. So, yeah, I mean, $6.5 million is a lot of money.

Yeah, we've been noodling on it. It's a couple points. It's a couple points for a key exec. Exactly. It's 2% of the company, which when you think about bringing in an executive at that level, that comp for that team, it's not that crazy to get to that number. And then today in the Wall Street Journal, Sam Altman is quoted saying that if they can nail it and get a major consumer device, that's a trillion dollar opportunity.

And that sounds crazy. But you look at Apple's market cap, you look at Android, Samsung, like, yeah, there probably is a trillion dollars in market cap. Well, there was also there was also the tinfoil hat saying like, oh, he's trying to dilute the profit. It's like, you know that they are issuing billions of dollars of stock employees all the time. This is not some like, you know, crazy conspiracy. They're issuing billions of dollars of stock to employees all the time. That's happening a lot.

This is not some crazy conspiracy. I do want to get your take on the actual device. We've seen some pre-renders, some AI images around a pendant with a camera on it, the Her model. Maybe it's an earpiece. I imagine you get pitched a lot of AI devices. We've seen the Rabbit, the Humane, the Friend. Are there any other ideas that you've seen

that could potentially be just AI devices, even not from OpenAI, but just in general, because Apple's got it pretty well covered. They got your ears, they got your eyes with the Vision Pro, they got your phone, the watch, the iPad, the laptop, the desktop. Like, Apple's, there's not a lot of white space in the Apple catalog, but it'll be interesting

to see if somebody can come up with something that's new. Have you seen anything that's interesting? Oh man, I really wish I could tell you about it, but yeah, we actually have a company in stealth. That's cool. I can't say much, but they're certainly different, you know, mode out. I'll be on the show when they're ready.

Yeah, I'll be super excited too, but. Okay, cool. People are being really creative, and then also, I mean, just generally, and I'm sure you're seeing this too, just given like the pace of how much is happening. And then also the competitive nature of these markets. Like it's clearly there's this big prize, maybe bigger than ever before. And so if you've got a really good idea, like, and if you don't have trouble raising funding,

getting customers or hiring people, like, you know, why talk about it too soon? So yeah, I'll be excited to share more on that. There's also, I feel like people have just been generally willing to fund hardware, but also kind of categorically bearish, right? People are just like, oh, like hardware is really hard. Like I'm gonna make this bet, but like it's really hard. But then you have- The meme of hardware is hard

used to be about supply chain. Yeah. It used to be about all the things that can go wrong and the working capital. We're at a point where like Aura and Whoop are like big businesses that I don't know, it's like ultra specifics on either, but I bet that Aura will be a really big company in 10 years. From my perspective, it's almost harder.

It is hard to make the device and manufacture it and deal with the fact that 90% of your revenue comes in Christmas but Like the real hard part is actually changing consumer hate behavior and getting someone to take off their Apple watch or add a Whoop band to the other wrist which is I think the predominant pattern for most whoop users, but What what what are you looking for in? Hardware startups that you're looking at what are are the pitfalls that you wanna see founding teams overcome before potentially backing them?

Yeah, so I'll say I don't have a massive background in hardware, I mean, I will say I was at Scale, you know, I was relatively early there, for, you know, and was an engineer there for four years, and then a PM, and we worked with a lot of hardware companies there. So I mean, the main customer of scale back in the very early days was self-driving car companies

and robotics companies. And so I have seen just through to working with them as customers, some potential pitfalls. And I mean, the quip is that hardware is hard. You've got all of the challenges of building a company and then you've also got to just manage supply chains and you have to be a lot more careful about the economics. Software is usually relatively high margin

or it's easier to make it high margin. Hardware, obviously much harder when you've got to figure out where all these materials are coming from and ramping up. So you get a bit of demand, like ramping up in a sort of scalable way. And then also implementation can generally just take a really long time. And it distributes at the speed of scalable way. And then also implementation, um, can generally just, just take a really long time. And it distributes at the speed of the internet.

Like you can go viral and get a hundred million people on a website in the day. You just can't ship a hundred million things anywhere in any reasonable amount of time. It just takes time. Like maybe one day. Um, but yeah, it's like, interesting to remember like Waymo was founded in 20 and 2009. Yeah. Right. So like just as that, like it took overnight six years to now become this overnight success. But yeah, you mentioned robotics. I'm interested in the pools of training data that are out there. Uh, we've been joking about scale AI.

Are they going to put everyone in motion capture suits eventually to get to the humanoid data sets? There's also a lot of work being done in, in simulated environments. Uh, is there a data wall that we're gonna run into with humanoid robotics? How are you thinking about the data challenges in robotics generally, whether that's in the humanoid side or elsewhere, because it feels like the humanoid narrative

is taking hold, people are funding companies, it's getting big, but if it's a 16 year journey like it was with Waymo, we could be in for a long one here. Definitely. Definitely. It's been interesting. I mean, I do think there are a lot of really good arguments for why we'll see robotics progress accelerate. And that's really, obviously the data is more challenging to get. It's not like you can just scrape the internet like we did with a lot of these LLMs and the data is kind of like there and ready for the taking for at least like some of the early transformer based models.

Though with an asterisk like as we're now moving into agents, I actually think you have to be more intentional about creating different types of data. But then now with robotics too, like, you know, you've got to figure out ways to get real world data, whether that's, you know, internally or using somebody like a scale or, you know or there's a lot of really exciting work going on in world modeling and simulation. So I think hopefully a combination of being really intentional about the data, both on the sort of like human collection side, and then also some of this work that we're seeing in simulation and world models will hopefully mean

that we don't all hit this data wall and we'll be able to sort of scale these systems more effectively. However, I mean, with robotics is always a little, a little bit challenging to tell what that exact timeline is. Yeah, interesting. We were talking earlier about the agentic, the coding market, the AI coding market. I was kind of breaking it down to you and is it three markets is two markets is it synchronous work asynchronous work? Is there a consumer prosumer, bottom up enterprise, top down enterprise sales motion? How are you thinking about just AI coding generally as a

market, as the businesses evolve, just give me kind of where you're at and then we can kind of tug on that thread in a bunch of different ways. For sure. My favorite, my favorite topic of conversation. They're definitely one of my favorites is AI cogent near near and dear to my heart. But yes, as a disclaimer, so I'm on the board of this company Windsurf. So agentic ID AI powered developer tooling platform.

Yeah, it's been it has been just utterly sort of shocking to me. Like, when you invest in a company, you expect, like, okay, hopefully things will go well. Like, hopefully the market will be there. And I just don't think anybody, I don't think anybody really saw this coming, just in terms of like how widespread tools like Windsurf would become.

And so right now, you're certainly seeing there's this sort of segmentation, specialization. You have tools like Windsurf and Cursor that are prosumer. So you've got people even with basically no coding or definitely no coding experience that are able to get up and running very quickly with these tools and really sort of talk to it and it acts like this sort of programmer that will you know like respond to what you want to do maybe it comes back and because back with error but it can maybe autonomously fix that error once you kind of give it some more guidance and you know it's just been incredible seeing like you know even even though i talk about windsurf all the time my father-in-law

who i never mentioned it to, not a programmer, just like once he was on a call, we were just talking, all talking. He's like, you gotta go, you're VC. You gotta go check out this company, Windsurf. I'm like using it to like, you know, help me out at work and create apps. And I'm just like, wow, this is incredible. Just how widespread he's like, you know, outside of Silicon Valley, all of that. So, so for those types of tools, I mean, you don't have to speak about Windsor specifically, but just how much of it is just a ton of people on small consumer plans versus bottom up enterprise adoption that gets rolled into a much larger consumption based

plan, or even like a seats based plan? Like, how is how is the market for AI tooling in the enterprise evolving in terms of pricing? Because we've seen Salesforce is talking about we want to price things not based on seats, but based on resolutions of customer service tickets. You could imagine charging someone for lines of code that get approved in pull requests or seat-based

or usage-based or just pure inference-based. So how is that side of the market just evolving broadly? Yeah, I mean, so what we're seeing is, there's certainly the prosumer segment for these tools, but it very quickly goes up, bottoms up into the enterprise. And in particular with Windsurf, I mean, from day one, we've been quite focused on the enterprise segment.

And so it's, we both have a large enterprise sales team and then these tailwinds from now all these prosumers and then, you know, sort of like professional developers that pick it up on their own and bring it in into their company. I think pricing, it's always interesting. It's something that we constantly think about. It's a very competitive market. So I mean, you know, you also have to kind of pay attention to what other people are doing.

I mean, per seat, easy to understand. But then, you know, obviously a lot of these models cost money to run and so you've got to figure out some sort of either credits or usage system. I don't think encoding where you're at to the point where it's price based on outcome, like, oh, well, if we get this done, then you pay. Like maybe, I've seen sometimes in customer support

and things like that. But yeah, certainly having a usage element, I've seen sometimes in like customer support and things like that. But yeah, certainly having like a usage element I think is pretty, pretty, pretty cool. What's your reaction when an entrepreneur pitches you and they're like, well, we're building agents to go after this labor, this like end labor market. And the TAM is, you know, a trillion dollars because they're just adding up like global payroll for like that type of work.

Like what's your reaction to that? Is that the wrong way to think about market sizing? If ultimately these are software products that can be delivered very inexpensively, which will ultimately create competition and drive maybe pricing down for that end service. Yeah, I mean, definitely, definitely some good points. I mean, generally I'm pretty optimistic. I think now just like kind of living through the co-gen market where,

just to use this as an anecdote, GitHub co-pilot came out. My first kind of pessimistic reaction was just like, oh, well, this is like so useful already and GitHub's got all these advantages. Okay, this like markets done. And they will be like, okay, every developer like uses it. And then it's kind of over. And it just the opposite of this happened. Like, it turned out that there's a lot of white space in the market for teams to innovate and to create really great product experiences. Whether it's a startup, whether

it's a foundation model company. And then also just like, I think the market blew my mind. What was the secret? What was the secret to either the, the, the challengers to get hub copilot? I haven't really used them. Is it, is it more driven by flexibility around which model you're plugging into and, and, and GitHub copilot kind of locking you into their model and not moving quickly enough, or is it something more on the user experience side? So I forgot the exact date. GitHub copilot started, I think,

open AI only given that sort of relationship, but it relatively quickly moved to an option. So it's probably, so you can put in Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which everyone loves. Yes. And I think actually recently, um, you know, I, I think I was reading this this morning, but GitHub announced like, okay, for these particular features, we're gonna go with Anthropic only, like particular backend features.

So it's clear like, their GitHub is not locked in to one model provider. I think what Cursor, Windsurf and others have done is just create different product experiences. And obviously GitHub is still doing very well, but I think what this is all has told me and kind of back to your original question was, these markets are actually much bigger

than we give them credit for. And so when I'm kind of sort of being pitched, maybe a ridiculous TAM, sure, it's probably good to like verify that and really drill in on that. But I mean, we are in the world where now software can do work. And so you do have to kind of, you don't just get the sort of tan being,

okay, it's the incumbent software spend. I think you have to also realize once the product gets that much better, people will want to buy more software and then also think about it as a work replacement. So you kind of get all these kind of bonus markets that, you know, end up being just like this huge thing. How do you process the tension between model providers

kind of figuring out if they're wanting to end the own consumer or be a platform? I mean, the most obvious example was Windsurf didn't get immediate access to Anthropix new models, which seems, you know, I'm sure you can't comment on that specifically, or maybe maybe you want to come in and put them in the hot seat.

But yeah, it just feels like it feels like it feels like it feels like a very real tension that's going to have to get resolved quickly because these are all big companies now, or at least the main players are big companies. There's billions of dollars of revenue on the line and everybody's in a constant race to be at the edge. You're right, I probably shouldn't say too much.

I mean, what I will say, yeah, it's something that I think is going to have to be addressed in the next year or two. And I think it's just very clear that co-gen in particular is this market that everybody kind of wants to get into. I do ultimately think that, I'd be shocked if in a year or two, we don't see co-gen products that are both synchronous. So like assistant, I can talk to it and from the same interface, I can delegate tasks. I just think that that is something

that a lot of people are building towards. It's like, there isn't a great experience today that kind of has both, at least sort of a generalized both. But I mean, ultimately, all these companies are, I think, in the sort of even medium term come up against each other. And ultimately what you want is sort of this distribution. And I think all these companies too are realizing

you also want the model and you wanna be able to give yourself really favorable economics. So yeah, it's gonna be a super exciting, even probably six to 12 months. I imagine. So legal, the sort of legal AI space has been heating up. Kind of an interesting comp. In many ways, it felt like Cursor had like a ton of mindshare and then Windsurf just kind of exploded.

People realized how quickly it was growing. At least that was my perception. And then Harvey similarly has been more in the sort of cursor bucket and that like tons of attention, bunch of rounds back to back. And then Lagora came out, feels like it came out of nowhere

and they raised a big series B this week. Is there, are you, do you have a kind of prediction or a take on what the next category to see these sort of battles play out? I'm sure you guys already have some bets and whatever category that is. She's already on the board of four companies that are going to dominate the next four categories to the board meeting exactly what you just said. Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm very lucky in that, you know, I think, I mean, even before I joined, so I've only been at Kleiner Perkins for two years,

and even before that, a lot of my partners made really great app investments. So for example, my partner, Ramoon, incubated Glean, which is now, you know, kind of the enterprise knowledge discovery platform in this kind of new AI era. So certainly, like, we've got a lot of apps in the portfolio. I mean, Harvey, we did their Series B. Ambience, which is a medical scribe,

also in the news recently. We did their seed in Series B. And then we have some investments in sort of sales AI as well. I work with this company, Nooks, which has started with a power dialer that people really like and is now expanding into other parts of assisting salespeople with AI. I'd say like those categories plus maybe add customer support, which we don't yet have kind of a generalized play in. Those are kind of like the battleground spaces. These are where it's going down right now. Like it's clear, the models work for the use cases. It's clear there's a giant prize at the end.

So you've got, you know, inevitably a lot of companies competing for it. In general, especially with software, you know, I think it's basically impossible to be the only company in your category. Can you fund a company that will just pick up the phone when I get like a robo AI call that's like trying to do some social engineering hack

or whatever and just pick up the phone and waste their time really inexpensively. That's I feel like that's some cybersecurity companies out there. Yeah, I think I think I've actually been pitched. I would have to find the name. What do you think about competition from the hyperscalers? Obviously Microsoft Build and Google I.O. happened this week and there's one narrative that's like oh so many startups are now just bullet points in a Google I.O. happened this week and there's one narrative that's like oh so

many startups are now just bullet points in a Google I.O. keynote but Ben Thompson wrote shortly after Google I.O. that Google only cares about search and they only win when it's directly impactful to search and so you might as a startup not need to worry if you're doing something that's more in the labs or experimentation phase for Google and Google is more just almost doing it as a startup not need to worry if you're doing something that's more in the labs or experimentation phase for Google and Google is more just almost doing it as a demo of their platform and then they really would be fine with another company just buying a bunch of TPUs and GCP

and building a real company on top of their innovation. But how are you thinking about startups competing in these new AI markets with the legacy incumbents? It's a really good question. And it's something that I think about a lot. Just been like, obviously, somebody like Google has giant advantages, distribution, money.

I mean, Google literally created the first Transformers paper. So, I mean, certainly it's something that whenever you're investing in an app company in particular, you need to, I think at least think very deeply about what's the roadmap of all these companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera. I mean, certainly seems like sort of areas in search

and sort of like social and prosumer that seem like kind of the most under the microscope with these big companies, but it wouldn't shock me if they tried, tried to compete in some of the other app categories we talked about too. So, in general though, startups, I liked about on startups, focus is important. And then, you know, I think if you move fast, if you're very strategic, there are a lot of good sort of like wedges you can sort of start with and then expand from there.

Yeah. What about M&A markets in particular? I mean, my reaction to the Windsurf acquisition was, and it's gonna be kind of hard for you to answer this, but was basically that like, whoa, like maybe that whole meme of like, oh, don't build a chat GPT wrapper or whatever Maybe that was overblown. Maybe that there's gonna be a lot of app layer companies that gets scooped up

Obviously open AI is moving very quickly So they're kind of early to this but you could imagine every hyper scaler needing application layer AI companies to slot in Especially if they've had distribution and they've actually scaled revenues and they have a really great team. And it feels like unlike in the previous era, like 2010 ish, like the hyperscalers are more sclerotic than ever. It's been 15 extra years, they're less founder mode. And so I don't know what your reading read is on the M&A markets broadly, but how are you thinking about the hyperscalers approach to staying on the leading and A markets broadly, but how are you thinking about the hyper scalers approach to staying on the leading edge of these AI application layer companies?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's important to remember, and I have to remind myself that Chad GBT is less than three years old. So it's like, this is happening so fast. And so when you think about like, I'm a hyperscaler and I see a market that is like, makes sense for me strategically, is it really faster for me to go and try to build it internally? Or is it faster for me to find a really great startup,

perhaps with expertise that I don't have and maybe some other advantage, whether it's the product or the distribution or something else, and then explore partnership conversations with them. And so I mean, one acquisition I can talk about is a company that I worked with at Founders Fund and still on the board of Neon is partnering with Databrack.

Cool. And it makes sense because it's like, you've got this team of database infrastructure experts and then you've got this company who clearly wants their customers to be able to realize the full potential of AI agents. And so you do need a database and memory for those agents. And so, it's certainly now,

now I'm trying to think in my mind like, oh, well, what are the other categories that that that hyper scalers might be looking in and what makes the most sense for each one? The big one to me that I'm trying to figure out is just video generation, which we had, I wouldn't call it a Ghibli moment this week, but VO3 was close.

Took a little bit, it just takes a lot more work and it's harder to get a consistent quality output. But I just saw that- And there isn't a single meme where everyone, like the Ghibli thing was like, just take your profile picture, take your whatever's in your camera roll, two words, boom, one shots and you have something cool.

With BO3, you have to be more creative with the prompt. Well, yeah, the interesting thing there is I can, it's so easy to imagine in the future where consumers are using video generation tools daily, just for fun. Oh, totally. Yeah, there's some consumers just making memes on the internet, then there's prosumer, SMB,

I'm gonna make an advertisement, and then there's the Hollywood studio that's like, I'm gonna make a movie, you're an independent filmmaker, but where companies kind of fit into that, I can see a world in which hyperscalers are kind of dominating like meta, for example, figures out a way to get really good at at video generation because it fits into the meta ecosystem or YouTube, you know, with with VO three. And I think that from my point of view, I can see some of these more independent foundation labs that are focused on video having to really move up market

to actually dominate because that feels like an area that like Google's not gonna necessarily build the thing that creates the next blockbuster video. But if you're competing for the prosumer SMB, feels like a really tough place to compete purely from a cost standpoint and with YouTube or Google's sort of YouTube data advantage. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know, any reactions to VO3 this week? Oh, I mean, super cool. And we were playing around with it. My husband's a founder and he was trying to make this new video for something that they're developing internally. And oh my God, just insane. So it's really cool. And I mean, I kind of agree with some of the points that have been made, but then on the flip side, I will say like, especially in video, there's so many really great models and they excel at a variety of different things. And so if

you're like kind of a third, you know, a startup that is not connected to, I mean, Google obviously is developing their own models. So if you're not connected to any one of the particular models and you can offer like kind of a best in class, like, okay, you can pick from, you know, many of them, maybe, maybe that's an opportunity or if you're in sort of like very, very specialized. So yeah, I mean, generally still, still optimistic, just kind of given at this point, there's not, in my opinion, a ton of platform risk. You've got so many of the hyperscalers and labs that are both closed and open source, offering these types of models.

Yeah, very cool. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. We'd love to have you back. This is fantastic. Yeah, this is great. Thank you guys. This was super fun. All right, see you later. Really quickly, let me tell you about- She has been on an absolute terror.

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or managing a complex program. Go to vanta.com to get started. Thank you to Vanta. Thank you to Vanta. Anyway, we have. Thank you, Davanta. Thank you, Davanta. Anyway, we have our next guest coming in. Steven from Lambda Labs. We've had Lambda School on. We're waiting for Steven.

Should we get some timeline? Yeah, let's hit some timeline. Did you see Yohei? Pocket is shutting down. And so this creator basically. We need a sound board that says, moment of silence. Vibe coded a quick free open source prototype

with some AI features called Keep Yard. Still has issues but I challenged myself to push this in one night. I thought this was very cool. I've been joking about we need someone to vibe code a new Google reader since that was such a popular product. It should just be out there and it's already starting to happen with Replacements for pocket and it seems like Stevens in the studio. So let's bring him in and talk about lambda. How you doing?

Welcome to the stream guys. How you doing? Welcome. How are you? Great to have you on it's good to see you looking fantastic by the way for wearing a suit, you know, thank you naturally I guess when in Rome, but yeah, I That said this is how you know everyone in Silicon Valley should dress. I agree. I agree Are you are you in Silicon Valley right now? Can you give us a little drinking a monster? Let's go so on brand it's amazing. So so I'm actually in my hometown of

Charlotte Vermont that's where I grew up. Yeah, and it's where it's where I live great and just just got back from Landed this morning from cool. That's it How would you describe the business these days? I know that well first we Well, first we gotta talk about the AI scene in Vermont. Oh yeah. Picking up? You know, yeah, I'd say that there's like one or two, one or two companies. There's a lot of,

I'd say, independent minded founders out here. But generally speaking, I'd say, it's more of a farming farming. Yeah, my little my little brother who's not in tech, went to college in Vermont and just stayed. I've tried to get him to come back forever. He's committed committed to the great state of Vermont, but

let's introduce him to Masayoshi sone and maybe he gets started with, you know, building an AI company out there. It could happen. It could happen. It's not off the table. So yeah, brief introduction. How would you introduce the company? How are you describing the different offerings and kind of challenges right now? Yeah. So Lambda is an AI cloud. It's a essentially really massive GPU cluster that all kinds of startups and hyperscalers use. And we've both invested a ton of where it's basically around a billion dollars worth of GPUs that we've deployed. Wow. And we've invested, you know, at this point, probably around $100

million into the virtualization software that allows us to essentially take that massive cluster of GPUs. So you can imagine taking a cluster, let's say 16,000 GPUs. And you can sort of dynamically partition it and hand out little slices to people on as little as a 15 minute basis. It's quite different from let's say a bare metal cloud where you need to sign a three or contract. We've basically implemented all this virtualization software

that lets you hotel on and off of it, while still maintaining high-speed, Infiniband interconnect. You did the meme. Another billion dollars for Jensen. Another billion dollars for Jensen. Is it actually primarily Nvidia chips, or are there other GPU providers that are competitive

at this point? I've been following George Hatz's journey with AMD. Is anything competitive with Nvidia right now from your perspective? I don't think that there's anything that's competitive with Nvidia right now. What you just see in the customer demand is total and utter Nvidia supremacy. And I think that this is going to continue on for some time. The task I always like to say is you've got to get a customer, they've got to be able to download kind of any arbitrary model off of Hugging Face, run that model, train the model, fine tune the model.

And then they have to buy from you and then buy again. Right. So that's, that's, that's the test I think, um, for any chip manufacturer. Um, and it's really hard to get a stable software stack. Do you like the term Neo cloud? Is that appropriate? You know, I think it's fine. I don't really have any opinion on it.

We kind of look ourselves as, we've always described Lambda as what would the cloud look like if it was reinvented from the ground up for AI? Training and inferencing large language models, training and inferencing large scale neural networks. And I think the NeoCloud's an appropriate description for that concept.

What is the balance between training and inference right now and how has that evolved over the last couple years? Yeah, so You know we We're we're For for the overall business, we're just we're just a bit over 500 million dollars of top line. And I'd say that essentially, thank you, thank you. Essentially, historically, that's been majority training, and then

and sort of minority interest, you know, maybe 80, 20 for, for, you know, training to inference. And now we've started to see that kind of switch over. I would generally say that when I see any sort of net new deal in the, in the space for large scale GPU capacity, it tends to be more inference driven these days. Sure, that's great, we're actually using the models. It's not just training every bigger models with no, I mean we saw that at Google IOS, Sundar Pichai

pulled up the chart of tokens generated and it's just completely up until the right. It's completely up until the right, I mean training is always gonna be something where you do it once and the whole point of training is that you wanna amortize that over as many tokens as possible, right? Cause that's just your fixed costs

that you're wanting to spread across as many generations as possible. And so that's the point. The point of training is inference. We're there. I always kind of look at this as like a, I always like to sort AI companies by revenue and just go,. Well, who's at the top probably open AI today? You know four billion five billion. It's a little bit hard to you know to clock it to exactly guess

But then you know next one down you kind of look It anthropic 800 million last published mostly developer API it entropic 800 million last published mostly developer API but pry fast growing I would imagine they're probably in the billions now because sonnet 3 7 was really good for code generation Google doesn't seem to be charging from what I can tell $250 a month now just a little pop up to 500 too. So they're getting my money. What are they charging for 250? So I am now on the Gemini Ultra plan.

OK. And I have 2.5 Pro preview. And then I also have access to VO3, but it's very limited. They can only generate two or three video clips per day. It's heavily throttled. But it's a $250 a month plan right now, and it's going to jump up to $500 a month in a few Months, so I imagine that across Gemini Pro subscriptions. They're probably gonna grow that pretty quickly just because I'm saying

Zero to billion dollars in 100% in a couple weeks, right, you know, yeah and So when you kind of do that breakdown What do what do we see in terms of total top line revenue? It's all inference, right? I mean, all of that is inference demand, whether it's image or chat, GBT or video generation, then mid journeys probably in hundreds of millions of dollars revenue run rate.

And so there's some substantial businesses that are being built right now. And not all of them are companies. So there's some substantial businesses that are being built right now. Yeah. What are some kind of narrative? What are some narrative violations, things that you feel like the broader ecosystem is getting wrong right now, given you guys have unique insight into actual usage and activity? Yeah. Okay. So the first one is just obviously, I think if you look back, there was that Sequoia think

boy piece that was published on like, where's the AI revenue? What's, you know, they sort of did that. There's a lot wrong with that analysis. So I don't need to go into that. But I'd say like the general pessimism of like, oh, it's a bubble. It's a bubble. It's a bubble. Yeah, I just remember, you know, I started Lambda in 2012. 2013 was the year that like Mark Zuckerberg went to Nurikshen and hired, hired Jan LeCun to start Facebook AI research at the time. And I just remember everybody in the field kind of at the time looking around, oh, is

it a bubble? You know, Google's just bought DeepMind and Facebook's buying Yann LeCun. So it must be a bubble because Mark Zuckerberg just came to NeurIPS. But I think that I think that in general, everybody underestimates how just what exponential growth looks like from you know, it always looks the same in the team, the same, you know, wherever you are, it always looks looks essentially the same. And how good the code generation has gotten over the last 90 days, right? If you were to flip back before January, um, uh, you know, state of the art for

code generation was, uh, four Oh, and then, Oh, Oh, one hadn't even, I think, been exactly released yet, um, with Oh, Claude Sonnet 3537, all this stuff, the code generation is getting so good that I think I can say here which is in a couple of years, you're just going to have a function that goes from cash into software. And that is gonna completely change the way that businesses operate because you're gonna spin up 500 different versions of the piece of software that you're searching for. You're gonna be able to do this sort of like

high throughput search through software space. It's gonna spit out a bunch of things. It's gonna have like a, maybe a tastemaker model that just rates it based off of the computer use compiled version of that software. It's like, well, these are all the source code bases for all 500 pieces of software. These are the top five. I'd recommend you launch this one.

Go for it. And I think that's going to really change the way that the world operates in technology. So should you learn to code if you're a teenager? Yeah, absolutely. I think that you still need to learn how to code. I don't see, I think it's really hard to, in the intermediate period, you're still gonna need to learn how to code.

Sure. I think that you're just gonna see just much higher leverage teams in the world right here you might always need to think like a programmer and so learning to code is part of that process that makes sense what about the evolution of chips and semis before we dive into that I feel like there's this general thesis that sort of, we've talked about this on the show, this idea of like, we call it like Jiro dreams of sushi software, right?

This like really craft. More art than science. Yeah, art and science, like super intentionally built software that is just, you know just super, super thoughtful. And you can see this in companies that maybe go after a category like CRM, where it's like, okay, Salesforce dominates CRM, but they come in and they build this sort of really beautiful, really thoughtful experience.

And typically, if the teams are good enough, they'll end up doing well. I think there's this sense that like that class of software is like safe from, uh, completely AI generated software. But in the, in the scenario you laid out where you generate 500 different variations of a potential tool that you'd use and it sort of automatically ranks it, uh, based on some taste-driven benchmark? Is it possible that that class of software is at extreme risk to disruption as well?

Yeah, certainly. I think anything that's just software is at extreme risk. You look at a business like Salesforce, right? It's almost as if, I mean, how important is the software? How important is the brand? how important is the distribution model? And I think that when you look the bigger the company gets the more important the latter become, you know The distribution model the the brand of the company how deeply embedded it is Inside of the day-to-day life of the customer that's using it. And it's sort of like, well, what is the value of Salesforce?

Is it the software? No, not at all. The value of Salesforce is the fact that every single company in the world, the first thing they do when they hire a VP of sales is like, make sure they have a Salesforce implementation. And then it sticks with the company until they're a S&P 500 component.

And then all of the company's data is in Salesforce. Does that have anything to do with the software that Salesforce has written? Is that the, does the mode have anything to do with the replacement cost of developing the software? Crowd app. No. So it's kind of interesting,

cause like stuff like software will be solved, but then stuff like how do you build a moat and how do you build a business won't be solved. So it's sort of like maybe just you know this is we're in the we're in the world for just uh the the business co-founder dominates the era of the ideas guy the era of the ideas guy is upon us yeah that would be really exciting okay i i I want to talk more specifically about the path to this future of like turning money into software and creating value that way. What is more important, just bigger training

runs, knocking down higher MMLU numbers, benchmarks, higher IQ points versus distilling models, faster inference, cheaper inference, baking some of these models down into silicon. What we're seeing with etched and putting the transformer architecture on a chip, they seem like two different vectors. Every time a new model comes out, my reaction is always like, well, this is good enough. I just want it to be faster. And so mid journey V six or whatever, I'm usually just like, yeah, I just love this

to be instantaneous. As soon as I type the words just generating in milliseconds. At the same time, the labs seem to be iterating towards bigger and better models and they and they have a mentality of like jobs not finished. But what's your take on the trade-offs there? Well, what we're seeing with the advent of reasoning models, as well as like the models that basically will do reasoning and then sort of like retrain the model to not do any reasoning,

but sort of baking in the reasoning is that the amount of compute that you you know the the the performance improves as a function of how much runtime compute you do yeah and so if you can make a faster model and you can reason faster about it. You can make an argument that actually might perform better in some circumstances. I think that we're gonna see all dimensions of that space explored by a variety of companies. There'll be people out there at the edge building the biggest frontier models.

There'll be people quantizing and distilling those models down to something that runs locally on your phone. That was actually kind of one of the things I did before this iteration of where Lambda is. It was sort of trained ConvNets that ran locally on the iPhone. And this is like 2013. And you kind of see the same thing there's use cases for that it's super useful you can have privacy preserving

image recognition on your phone but it's not gonna be the same quality as like something that goes back to a data center I think actually if there's one narrative violation just going back to you know you said this like world of software generation a lot of people are know, you said this like world of software generation. A lot of people are kind of stuck in this like, okay, AI is, is generating software. And I've got this entire, I think, thesis on where the future, where we're going. You won't need any software at all. And that the neural network is going to completely replace all the software.

And so let me walk you through this. You won't need any software at all and that the neural network is going to completely replace all the software. So let me walk you through this. The idea is that instead of generating a program, let's say a calculator and Excel spreadsheet, just go to chat GPT and say, hi, please behave like a program. Please behave like this calculator or behave like this spreadsheet. Generate an ASCII user interface for me. And I want you to essentially just respond, you know, implement the logic of that program in your mind. Um, and that is what I call neural software and it's really squished.

You know, normal software is really brittle, right? If you make a typo, you, you leave a keyword out, you miss a semicolon, it's not going to compile. This type of neural software, it's not really possible to have a bug. It's really more just that you've have a misunderstanding or you've misprompted it or something. And I think that that's where all this is going. It's not code generation, but it's gonna be your large language models are gonna be, sort of take over more and more of program space. And you will be largely interacting with these sort of transformer models

or next token prediction models generally. And they will be the software that you interact with. What about diffusion models? We saw Google bring diffusion to text models. Yeah, I was seeing something like 900 tokens per second. They generated I saw a demo where someone generated a full calendar application, all the code for the calendar application in three seconds. It was 3000 tokens or something like that. That feels like,

um, a, you know, an algorithm from image generation that now we're seeing in the text world. Simultaneously we're seeing images in chat, GPC, maybe do something more transformer or token based. And so these lines are blurring. Can you give us any insight into what's happening there? Is that exciting or is this kind of just in the experimental phase?

Well, I mean, this is like, whether it's exciting or not is gonna kind of answer the question you had earlier, which is how successful are baked in transformer ASICs gonna be, right? Because sort of like as the space, question you had earlier, which is how successful are baked in transformer ASICs going to be? Because as the space, the underlying space changes, then every one of those ASICs now becomes a lot less valuable. And you kind of have to go back to the more general tensor processing that you see inside of tensor cores and you see inside of the architecture

of things like TPUs. And away from really specific things that have to do with the KV cache and different transformer specific architectural things you might wanna put into an ASIC. And so I think that it's interesting to see you've got diffusion models, you've got things like Mamba, and where there's alternatives to the transformer that have what's called basically linear complexity in terms of the amount of memory that you need for the context length growing, which is better than the quadratic complexity you see inside of normal transformer models. And I think there's going to continue

to be a lot of innovation in the model architecture space, and that will probably benefit NVIDIA a lot. Got it. Are there any other side projects in semiconductors that are exciting to you? Huge wafer scale computing like Cerebris. We talked a little bit about baking things down onto ASICs. We saw that path play out with Bitcoin, with the FPGAs, and then the ASIC kind of Bitcoin mining.

There's other approaches, I'm sure NVIDIA is not asleep at the wheel. Jensen Long's in founder mode. He's aware of the boom, he's aware of the demand. I'm sure people are asking him, how can we run diffusion models faster? How can we run transformer models faster? What are you expecting on the semiconductor side

over the next few years? Well, it's pretty clear that I'd say the front runners for competing with Nvidia, which are all very far behind Nvidia, but the ones that are sort of, I think the farthest along is probably, I would say today is Google and to some extent Amazon with Tranium and Inferentia.

That space is always evolving fast but I think it's kind of a little bit telling that AMD hasn't with all the resources, with all the sort of clarity on what you're supposed to build for the market hasn't been able to kind of capture enough market share. Dylan Patel is going to turn it around. He's going to write just one more report and AMD is going to be back. I'm bullish. That's all it takes. All it takes.

I love it. But in terms of, can you give us a little perspective on, obviously, if I'm doing a ton of inference on Lambda, I'm probably in the CUDA ecosystem, probably in Nvidia land. If I want to take that over to Amazon or Google with TPUs, how much of a barrier really is that? Can you kind of explain?

Because at the same time, we have these incredible code generation models. It feels like putting an AI agent on rewrite this CUDA for TPU, that seems like the easiest thing to do. It seems like a problem perfectly tailor-made for AI agents to just sit there and write boring Translation code. It's not even so even feature design, right? Wasn't that in the TL where this was making a joke about the anthropic safety

snitching on the user and someone said Port this pie torch code over to Jack's And then it says, you know, searching, calling FBI. Calling FBI. Do not do this. You're going to pull the rug on the entire economy. Preserving the underlying chips that it's running on. It's so important to America. So I think that, I think that,

okay, the stuff that this code generation is really good at today is still sort of what I would call within the realm of what, you know, one shotting a basic program, one shotting sort of a, a one page program where it could be much longer than one page, but it's sort of like single file or a function or, or, you know, a class class something like that not necessarily Some maybe I'm just behind on it a little bit and I'm not you know doing what the kids are doing or something with with Sort of an AI ID, but I just kind of like when I'm when I'm

Vibe coding I will just tell either chat GPT or Gemini or Claude, I'll go do this in one page, like, have it be a one thing, I want to copy and paste this into my my thing and run it. And it's quite good at that. Now when you talk about like going through an entire code base, fixing the compilation errors, because there will be like subtle bugs that get introduced. It's not quite there yet. It's just the problem is that I now am at like 100% confidence that it is going to be there in just a couple of

years. And that's kind of why I know that every sort of megawatt that that we build and every GPU that we deploy is just gonna get met with demand on the other side because Just two years out like if you just look two years ago 2023 Codegeneration is primitive. Yeah primitive. It didn't work now today today it really works for more simple programs. I think two years from now it's just gonna it's gonna make you feel sick when you look at it. So what are the big bottlenecks you what you foresee between like, energy, water, land? Are you going to be building the

data center in space? What do you think the future looks like for you? So I think that the the bottleneck is definitely what I call like wrapped power. So I think there's plenty of generated power. Right now it's just not wrapped up in a data center shell. It's not in a powered shell. It's not in a facility that has direct to chip liquid cooling integrated into it. And so it's sort of like that wrapped up power that's

like ready for the current generation and next generation of chips. I think that there's there's definitely some like regulatory bottlenecks or I would just say regulatory hurdles that can be removed. And I think there's a lot of hope that this administration is going to start to remove those. That's like, whether it's like looking at sort of the way that we run utilities where you kind of have to, in some cases, become an unregulated utility and put like, let's say, you know, build a data center power plant, which is to say behind the grid or not attached to the grid power generation station next to a data center. And not every state's going to allow that.

And I think that there's, there's probably a lot to do in the regulatory side to unleash the free market and let people build. And so I think that I think there's some hope there and the the other thing is just really I think building large contiguous spaces is like is pretty clearly the answer. Well good luck with that I'm glad I don't have to deal with it. It's a lot of logistics. It's a real pain. It sounds like a lot of work.

But you've been doing it for 14, 13 years. Yeah, classic overnight success. I'm sure you got another decade in you at least. So good luck to you. Yeah, that's right. We'd love to get you back on. This is a fantastic conversation. Yeah, come back on again soon.

Thanks, guys. It's so many fun angles. Love what you do. Long time fan. This is really awesome. I didn't clock you as a Monster Guy, too. We've got to go deeper on energy drinks next time. Yeah, there's so much to talk about.

Lots to talk about. But this is fantastic. You're the man. Thank you so much for coming on. Take care. Great chatting. Cheers. Quickly, let me tell you about Numeral.

Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Should we sing sales tax AGI? Sales tax AGI. Go get Numeral. head over to numeral HQ sleep last night, John. Oh, terrible. I woke up at 4 AM. It was a disaster.

I know I'm going to get cooked, but you don't have to be cooked because you can go to eat sleep.com. Use because TBP and I got a 76. It was brutal. 99. I can't I can't get 99. I got a 76, it was brutal. 99, I can't get to. 99. I'm back to back 99s.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong. And then also we gotta tell the folks about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by Moen and Foch. Let's give it up for multi-asset investing. Yep. And their partnership with Aston Martin,

which we might have more information on soon, but stay tuned I can wait we got Sam lesson coming in the temple of technology very quickly Do you want to do some timeline while we wait for him is here? No, I love I know Dworkesh Patel dropped a banger on Claude for day. He sat down with Trenton Brick in and Chalto Douglas Talking about Claude for how far reinforcement learning can scale I haven't had a chance to listen the whole thing I listened to about half of it kind of in and out while I was trying to sleep last night but just a very cool vibe of like three people

having a conversation right on the day when you want to know this stuff talking all about this fascinating metaphor for AI safety because it's been controversial. Of course, there's like some drama around some random anthropic news. But the cool thing that I liked was they said, basically, if you want to tell the AGI what to do and how to behave in the best interest of humanity, you could give it specific rules, but it might actually be better to say, imagine there's an envelope, AGI,

and in that envelope is what I want you to do, all the rules I want you to follow. You can't access this envelope, but you have to behave in accordance to what you imagine to be in this envelope. And so the AGI is just like, I have to behave in the interest of humanity. It was a cool like, thought experiment almost.

It was very cool. Anyway, Patrick O'Shaughnessy was shattin' it out. He says, one of his favorite genres of podcasts is recurrent expert guests on the same show. If you're interested in the nitty gritty of AI model progression, you'll enjoy this. So go check that show out this weekend. It's a great lesson.

And we have Sam Lesson from Slow Ventures in the studio. Welcome to the studio, Sam. Gentlemen. There he is. It's Jessica Less lesson and we have Sam lesson from slow ventures in the studio. Welcome to the studio Gentlemen areas. It's Jessica lessons husband Flash I saw her like literally minutes ago. That's no way Tell her to tell her to come by at least and say hi if she's not busy. Yeah She's she's busy this moment Well, we got 30 minutes, you know, we got the crossover of the century TBPN the information it dropped today. It was great. I love that Yeah, actually I knew about the development of that story from dinner conversation. Oh, yeah, it was a lot of yeah I bet

Abe is Abe is man. Yeah, there you go. It was it was fun hanging out with him and Kind of see what you guys you guys are the cover of the weekend section. Is that right? We are the big are you guys gonna do a print edition for us coveted space? I always thought that they should actually do a print edition. I think it's time Cycle I got the Wall Street Journal here. I need yeah, I know I was in a once weekly Saturday dropped off on the doorsteps of every Kids to like deliver it with the with the you know throwing it out the window Yeah

Look I was in an airport lounge in Germany two days ago and they had all the print newspapers and I'm like look there's a missing Opportunity here the Germans want to read about the information. They want to read about technology brothers. Yeah, yes, let's get it to him You guys are big in Germany. I'm sure well somebody started translating our streams into Dutch and interesting do another Like the first choice like those you want like Mandarin or something? We're trying to get big on way bow. Yeah Yeah, but we're expecting to have some push back Anyways, it's great to have you on, as always.

Congratulations on your success. You guys are everywhere. This isn't the new studio yet, though. Well, you're a part of it. You're a part of that success. You have to come down next time you're in LA. Come by in person. It'll be great.

I'll come by in person. Tuesday will be the first show. Yeah. It's a lot closer than Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. You know? Yeah. Yeah. What's there?

Oh, guys. Is that the new is that the new? Dnbc You can't make this whole CNBC rival thing and not know where CNBC is everyone always Yeah, Andrew Reed was like, oh, they're making squawk box for tech and I was like Gotta start watching squawk boxing Netflix Netflix has a new billion dollar New Jersey studio. Maybe we should be interested.

Maybe it's New Jersey and maybe we're taking the fight to New Jersey in the future. We'll see. Let's think it. LA is fine. Where were you traveling this week? I went, I've had an insane travel schedule, but I was, Monday I went, I was New York,

Frankfurt, New York, San Francisco was my week. What's going on in Germany? Germany was a personal thing I had to take care of, but New York was the Solana acceleration, what is it? The big Solana conference, which they call ship or die, very dramatic. Nice, nice. You're infamous there, right?

The GM guy, do you still get comments on that? I saw Raj backstage. I was one of Solana's first investors. Jason Calcanis, I was the first investor in Uber. I like to do that for Solana. I've known those guys for a long time and I saw Raj backstage. We were reminiscing when I did the GM thing, which became one of the first meme coins and blew up. And got, if you remember, I got Raj banned. No, I know. I know, that was crazy.

From Twitter. It was such a funny- So you and I were joking about that. Yeah, this was like Twitter still, right? So it was like somebody at Twitter was like, didn't get the joke, obviously didn't have context that like you guys are boys and just hit the band button.

The thing is I unfortunately have other people on Twitter legitimately threatened to kill me, which that's not so good. You gotta get that taken down. But the Raj was a pretty funny one for them to respond so quickly to. Yeah, yeah, quick reaction. There's so much to cover in the news.

It's AI week. It's AI week. It's in it every week AI week, boys. No It's a week. It's in it every week. AI week, boys. Now, but this week, particularly AI week, Microsoft, Google I.O. Open AI I.O. Anthropic a big are you are you taking a victory

lap on the idea this is a sustaining innovation that Google's going to win. You guys actually I'll tell you a funny funny. You guys know my associate Jack Reigns. You know this guy? Yeah. Jack's sitting, he's right over there.

Jack, he can come wave for a second. Hey Jack, come say hi. Jack sends me this long missive this week about how amazing Google is and how Google is gonna win the AI war. Well, what's up dude? And I'm like, what value are you adding? I've been saying this for two years.

Yeah. I'm like, thank you. I'm like. I wanna check out all the little Google. I was like, I was like, Jack, I was like, Jack, you know, you're an associate at an early stage venture capital fund. Telling us to buy Google stock is not exactly.

Hey. Hey guys, I wanna see slow as the next crossover. Yeah, crossover. Become an RIA. Do it. Put 30% of the fund. We've actually. Yeah crossover. Let's come in RIA We've actually looked into it definitely nothing I mean, I mean the my favorite comparison I forget who posted it but they were like would you do you want? You know Google at you know

17 times earnings or Costco at 50 times earnings like at this moment Look here's the negative on I.O. The negative I.O. is that per usual, Google's actually terrible at marketing. And so they just launch everything. And so you're like, I have no idea even where to focus right now, right? Like it's not- My value comes in figuring out.

Thanks, John. Focus on generative AI videos, V03, that's the thing. It's like so many things, you're like, I don't know. The net of it is like, they're just crushing it, right? Like from a tech perspective. And I gotta say, I'll tell you a funny story. I spent like 20 hours, quote unquote,

vibe coding over the last week because I was on so many airplanes. And it turns out airplane Wi-Fi, vibe coding, perfect match of activity. So I just like, was like messing with these things till my eyes bled. And you know what happened in hour 11? What? I stopped using chat GPT and went all in on Gemini.

Cause it's actually better, Gemini 2.5 Pro is just like way better at a bunch of these coding tasks. It's better at structuring. It was like a bunch of stuff. So it's, I think it was absolutely a Google week. But were you using codex? No, I wasn't using codex. I was. There you go. There's always a little bit of skill issue. Look, this is one of my other insights from the week. But were you using codex? No I wasn't using codex. Look this is one of my other

insights from the week, spending a week you know literally flying around the country, vibe coding in the air. You know the whole what model to use thing is a complete fucking mess, right? And I think that the analogy I now have in my head is it's kind of like imagine walking into a crowded room where you don't know anyone and saying who should I trust, right? And then think the analogy I now have in my head is it's kind of like imagine walking into a crowded room where you don't know anyone and saying who should I trust, right? And then by the way, every two seconds a new person pops into the room. You've no and like people are like, oh, or you can trust this person 95% of the time, you can't trust them with your life, you know, but totally, that's a totally separate chain of thought, which I think is important. I was talking to some entrepreneurs today about if you think about what AI is today,

it's like having a B minus employee or like an 80 percenter. And the question is how do you get value out of 80 percenters is actually more difficult than it looks in a lot of ways, right? Because the reality is so much of work is about trust. But isn't it more of their B minus because you're averaging their effectiveness on different things? more of their B minus because you're averaging their effectiveness on different things. In my experience, for certain tasks, 80, 90% of the time, it's amazing. And then some percentage of the time, it's so bad that you would ask the employee, is everything okay?

Kind of. But I think the thing I really think about, guys, is if you think people are always like, oh, there are all these tasks that AI is more efficient at and so clearly those jobs will just go away And it'll be it and I think that's like exactly the wrong model because the reality what people don't understand is the real reason You hire people to do work is not to do the work It's to have a throat to choke when the work goes badly right it's like why do you have an accountant? You don't have an accountant to do your taxes. You have an accountant so that when the IRS comes and says, what's wrong with a lot, why you get this wrong?

You're like, I didn't do it, that guy did it, right? And so I think that's the interesting thing is like, there's all these models like great, good news, you get rid of the employee and now you get a queue that's mostly right and you approve it. You're like, I don't wanna approve that stuff. Like the whole point is to have someone else. Yeah, I think our example is like,

we use a lot of the different deep research products and like we still would love to hire an amazing researcher. Yeah, so that you can fire them when they're wrong. Right? Like you need like it just the point is like there's this whole I think there's a lot of like well it's an agency thing too. It's like if you could tell if you could tell deep research to like try itself and then try other products and then combine the outputs of all the different things and maybe that's a research agent that can. There's all these things, but I think the ultimate model in my mind is I don't even care

what the average persons are using. I don't care about some review online that's four stars for coding for this type of, I don't care. What I care about is what are the smartest people I know in the world using and how do you make that transparent? So I could just be like, oh, it's this type of task

I'm gonna trust this model for that and like that needs to be up-to-date It's much more like an identity problem or like a human trust problem, right? Then it is, you know a technology problem in a lot of ways and it's just changing really fast So it's been a fascinating week, but yeah net I mean pulling up pulling all the way up. Yes I'm taking a victory lap on Google wins. And yes, I'm taking a victory lap on incumbents win, because that's what's happening. So you're saying to Jack, like, thanks for reading my memo from two years ago?

Yeah, exactly. Well, in fairness to Jack, he wasn't on the team two years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was very excited to discover Notebook L, but. Love you, Jack. I gotta get him out of the pool house. Yeah, anyway. I want to talk about some other stuff. What do you think about the

Johnny Ive news and hardware generally? I mean where to begin. I know, I know. This is my favorite part of having you on the show. We don't have to prompt at all. We just like do we could give you three words Johnny I've Hardware. Okay, a few things first of all I mean my my my tweet on this one was happening was like well I guess all these hundred million dollar AI researchers are cheap, right? It like the designers that are gonna get paid bank on aqua hires in this in this era, right?

Look, I think it was marketed in a really interesting way, right? Like it's marketed as like they try to pick the biggest number possible. It's a 2%. They paid 2% for this thing, right? For him, they marketed as it's this big number, I think because that's it's kind of the pissing match of AI, right? Is you're supposed to look really big and powerful with big number. And I'm sure Johnny doesn't mind being told that he's worth $6 billion. But it's kind of one of those interesting PR stories

of how you shape the narrative as much as anything else. The hardware thing is interesting. On one hand, I actually think it's like, if you're opening out, you do need a hardware play. You're gonna get fucked otherwise. Like how, you know, Meta discovered this years ago, which is like being beholden to those hardware is really tough.

In this case It's only more so right because of kind of the way these chips are gonna fall with Android and iOS So I don't think they're wrong and like metas got its glasses. Everyone's so like it's not Strategically wrong from first principles. I think the problem is that I have is I just think that like the likelihood They're gonna successfully introduce a new piece of hardware is like zero, right? Like and that's just you know, it's you know You're gonna have a phone and they could try to compete on the phone But it's very hard for them to imagine building like a fully featured phone that you know

Whatever and then also having so well the one thing that does seem clear Haven't they said this is a new type of device that will Integrate with your phone and your computer and that screams to me. Okay. Well, no is app. Yeah. Yeah, I said septum piercing So So when I left went in 2014 No, but sorry sorry to finish my thought that the issue with that is if you're saying we're going to create a new device that integrates with your Apple ecosystem, that seems like a bit of an uphill battle. Look what happened to Pebble, right, and the Apple Watch, right?

In the end of the day, it's like, look, you have... The iPhone is a hugely breakthrough device. This is, by the way, not my line. It's a friend's line, but hugely breakthrough device. You already had a phone, right? It wasn't like a new thing you were putting on your body. The glasses work, that's a thing that was already on your body. The watch work, it's a thing that It's really hard to imagine you're gonna get through with some new device. So my joke, but it's only half a joke is look, you know, 12 years ago, I got obsessed with the idea of making an E-cane.

So imagine bringing back the cane. Right? And like no idea where you put that. There's like Novacane. Yeah, Staff. If you think about the cane, it's actually, you put a shitload of batteries in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Big antenna, right? And you know what the nice part is, the world is getting less safe, so you can beat people with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The world is like, the world is getting less safe, so you can beat people with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The world is aging, so everyone needs canes. There's all these macro trends in favor of bringing back the cane.

And then could you drop a GPU and a microphone and a camera on the top and talk to your cane? A smart cane. Yeah, a smart cane. A smart cane. A smart cane. No more dumb, I don't want to be pitched anymore non AI came Okay, I've had enough like I'm just saying like if they actually if open AI came out like we were bringing back the cane

I'd be like, all right listen for all my You know that Johnny I've got his start at a design firm that was working on bathrooms And so maybe there's all like smart toilet, You know, you really see this in Japan. Yeah, well there is, someone just came out. There is like a new Fitbit for your poop. I know some friends that have funded that. That's what I was thinking. I funded that.

You funded that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know some people that's funded that. I funded that. It's called Throne. I think it's called Throne. I think it's interesting for a bunch of reasons. One is it's just like personally

as like a quote unquote biohacker. There's so much information on how your digestion, what's happening with your digestion, your hydration, all these different things. Look, in the end of the day, you want to copy behavior as people are already doing. And, you know, in college, one of my roommates, Brian, would send me pictures of his poop all the time. So like, you know, you just got to double down. It's brutal.

Let's move on. Hyperscalar Cat Bbacks. Give us anything to get us off of this Hyper scalar catbacks. Here's my line on it. I flew through JFK today. They're spending 20 billion dollars renovating JFK Yeah, I'm like this catbacks is nothing spend more money on AI like if you're gonna spend 20 billion dollars I'm like renovating JFK all of a sudden, spending $100 billion on AI doesn't seem so crazy. What about, say as much as you can about what Meta, you know, Meta's playbook over the next kind of six to 12 months. I know they've been having talent, you kind of retention. Llama was the big question.

Yeah, llama behemoth delayed delayed. Look, in the end of the day, I, again, I, as you know, have a huge respect for the team there and the leadership there. I think the beauty of meta, as I've said many times is it's a heads you win tails you win, right? You know, from, from a, from a investor perspective, right? Which is, if you think about it, it's like the most obvious highest value use case in the world for everything that exists is making ads way more targeted and effective, right? And that's happening and it's an incredible trend to ride

and they're gonna crush it. Mark and that team is like deeply competitive. They wanna win, win, win, right? And so just from a pure competition perspective, I think they're gonna like go to the mat to win, win, win. And like there'll be many chapters to that. But the good news is, they have a massively profitable business

and immediate use case, right? That is deeply aligned. And so I just, you know, I learned a long, long, long time ago to never bet against Mark, especially when he cares about it. Yeah, it feels like with Meta, there's huge value to having Llama be a free LLM for them that they can vend into every corner of the app, in places the consumer doesn't feel or or see so

profanity filtering and Understanding what content goes where ad matching? Generative AI to clean up Instagram photos all these things that will just be under the surface Yeah, as opposed to what Google's doing which is like now we have 10 new apps notebook Lm like you're we're not seeing that for meta and maybe that's the right strategy Surface yeah as opposed to what Google's doing which is like now we have ten new apps notebook LM Like you're we're not seeing that for meta and maybe that's the right strategy I look in the end of the day meta has the most natural beautiful use cases for AI Which is what you're pointing out and therefore like they don't need to do a bunch of crazy shit, right?

They just need to like win at like the core and then basically in the open source thing is clear It's like they actually for like think about ads They don't really care if they're doing the AI or someone else's because it's all gonna go to them either way, right? In the end of the day, it's just better if more people have access to it and the innovation will happen So look one of the things I did in my vibe when I got really into like all the platforms, right? I spent a bunch of time remember Digital Ocean Ocean's doing a great job with AI, right? Like it turns out like their services are really good and like it was really easy to boot up some agents on top of like you know a

knowledge base on top of you know like deploy you you write some code and you want to actually get it on servers always still a hassle and it's like they've actually done a great I was like incredibly impressed but like you know and then you say like where is llama showing up it's like well it's like right there like you just click a button and you're using long it's like no bullshit gotta get a killer video generation model out of Meta. Like they're the only one that has another data source that's similar to YouTube.

How do you see that market evolving? There's a bunch of foundation model labs doing video generation. And I can see some of those getting to the point where they could crush it for big Hollywood movie studio, making very specific types of scenes or assets. But then it feels like the low end of the market for, if you're a random SMB and you wanna make an ad

or something like that, yeah, maybe use some vertical SaaS, but also maybe. I wonder how much it matters. I mean, I had this conversation actually with my good friend, Dave Morin, on our little weekly You know bullshit session more or less more or less We're talking about Dave also somehow cracked like the top of the angel there was like oh, yeah

He's number less than he he was the top dog. It's amazing. So Validity of that list we'll talk about yeah, yeah we could but I mean I just like to see my boy Dave I like to see look my like my boy my partner Kevin was like number four on the list. It's a very interesting but the But what does this say is the thing Dave and I were talking about is like look You know if you think about what's going on like with memes this whole world, there's this high road, low road thing. Everyone's really excited about super high end video generation and Hollywood and da-da-da. You know what's happened in the media landscape?

Those things don't make any money. No one cares about these movies anyway. They're consuming low end crowd sourced memes on the internet. That's where attention is. That's where the energy is. That's where attention is, that's where the energy is, that's where entertainment is. I think obviously the pure technologists and the highfalutin people are really excited about the narrative, storytelling, beautiful, da-da-da-da.

But when it comes to what tools will actually be used, how things will be marketed, how humans will interact with each other and communicate in the store, I think actually it will be much more budgety tools that actually win and The other stuff is kind of just you know intellectual, you know masturbation a little bit It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it like speaking of that from a speaking of that. Why is speaking of? masturbation Why is only fans getting priced at eight times earnings? You know, I I so desperately want to buy only fans guys. I've wanted to buy it for years.

I had plans. Like there's been a few iterations of this. No, it's so good. It's so good. I just only fans. I just so good. This is your reaction is part of the reason I want to buy it. You love the contrast. The buyer pool is small, so the price is low. The pro. Well, that is part of the reason I want to buy it. You love the controversy.

The buyer pool is small, so the price is low. Well, that's part of it. The other thing is everyone, because of the buyers, it's actually the best AI short you could possibly think of. Right. Because part of the reason it's getting sold, my understanding, and like the whole story is like, well, we're going to have all these AI girlfriends. Sure. So like the creator economy is going to get crushed on these things. And I think that is like a very 101 simplistic take

on what's actually happening. The other thing is a lot of the cost that goes into basically generating revenue on OnlyFans is from messaging, which is done by people in the Philippines. It's all LLM's and AI's. So this is the thing, everyone, OpenAI is like the greatest human loop AI platform in

existence, right, from position, because you have, I think you still need real brands. I think that having human brands matters at the top end. Your ability to then like effectively automate, it's kind of like the Facebook story, which is your ability to slot in AI and bank it, right, on messaging, is like off the charts with the OnlyFans and improve the quality. So I think it's interesting. I think it's like this classic thing where it's being sold. I've always loved the asset.

It's the number one creator platform in the world. It's so defensible because they actually have a very low take rate because they're so big. No one can assault them, right? Because of how they're kind of set up. What's the take rate? It's like, it's really low. I want to say it's like 10%, maybe 15,

but it's like much lower than you think. And as a result, like you have this incredible cash engine. I mean, YouTube is like 45% and many other sites are 30% just for general content creation platforms. So the upshot is like this incredible position. I think there are huge product opportunities that always have been with it. But then you have this double storm of like one, people like you guys boo it because you Patrician technology brothers, right? Like and you won't like acknowledge human nature and you want to do this and then two there's all these fancy investors who like

I think it's dead because they read the front page of the Wall Street Journal about AI and don't understand what's actually going on I'm like, that's great. This is my zone. Yeah, I have no I you're to become an RIA to do it probably. So I got to figure out how to not do that. I also like for what it's worth. I'm a seed investor. I don't know how to raise the $2 billion. But it called me if you got it. Well, speaking of seed investors, uh, I don't know if you saw this chart from pitch book emerging managers are on track to raise less money this year than they have in a decade. Uh, it's now under $20 billion. During 2021, it was up at $60 billion.

It was really, really spiked. 2022 was around $50 billion. And now we're down in the single digit. Just one JFK renovation. That is a lot of money for emerging managers. This is, I assume, defined as first fund. We're going to put $20 billion as an emerging manager. Wait, how much did they get in 2021?

Well, you put it, I mean, you put it in like 20,000, $50 million funds. That's the idea at least, or that's what happened. They're all, I just, I've been so skin, I don't see any of this working out for anyone, right? Like, you know, I know it's, it's one of the, they'll always be the random winner. Yeah, but isn't that the nature of the game?

It's like startups follow a power loss, so do funds. I just think we have to hit a size gong because the 64 billion that they raised in 2021 still earn 12 billion of fees. And so let's just give it up. Congratulations to the immersion managers. Guys, I think you guys are cheering too much. If you do the math on now, I'm joking

You're being doing the math on being a small fund and being locked in for ten years as like a solo GP with your emerging Manager fund and you're kind of shitty subscale. It's actually a pretty bad business What's wrong with being locked in? No, no, no, no, no, they're like what you're saying What you're saying is so real which is imagine you have a startup. a startup and it's like, okay, you have to commit to this Startup for a decade even if by two and a half years in Like is that real though? Is that real though? I feel like most emerging managers they they write the checks in the first year and a half two years and then yeah They get investor updates to pass them along to LPs

But like they could go and get a job at Big Tech and sure but it's still even if it's couple hours a week for ten years yeah I guess that is it also it keeps you from doing other it's just messy and complicated and the reality is again like if you're earning two and twenty and you're never gonna see the twenty right like the two ends up actually you know on a fifty million dollar fund after you pay for actual things you're doing fine like no one's crying but but it's not some great business. I think the only reason to raise a $50 million emerging manager fund is to have enough card flips to prove that you can size up a bit. Now I think the flip side is true too, which is I don't know how anyone makes money on

a seed fund that's over $200 million. I just know math doesn't work. I think there's a sweet spot of fund sizes that work. Too small, the economics to make it work. Even if you have a banger, it's not that important. And too big, it's just the law of big numbers. You're never going to produce an important fund from a returns perspective. So look, what we do, Seed Investing, we're, I think, in the sweet spot, obviously, because why would I not think that? We've made money. I'm very proud of that, I care about DPI, whatever. But here's the thing. Sorry, sorry, sorry, we're laughing.

We have to explain, because you can't see it, but the chiron right now says seed investor, don't become a seed investor. Stay the fuck out. But then the reality is, even from my perspective, it's not the best business. You do it because you love it, right? But if you just did the math, being an asset manager and earning 2% and just getting enough

DPI to justify more 2% fees is for sure a more scalable business model, which is why most people do it. Do you think part of why every emerging manager jumps into seed is just like they can't do growth because I feel like the skill set of being a growth investor is in some ways more repeatable. You know, you get people that come out of investment banks and they have all the skills to underwrite a company that's at a billion dollars. There's less risk. But at the same time, when you think about someone who's, you know, starting a new fund, if they're going out and ready, raising a growth fund on fund one, like that just feels harder to marshal. Question. It's like, who's going to give you LP level dollars, right? And like,

by the way, if you're, if you're going to later stage fund, you're trying to like model to like a guaranteed, whatever it is, to an AFAX or whatever. Why would you give it to the crazy kid, right? The crazy kid you give money for, cause they might be right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so you want that seed bet. And then also I feel like a big part of the emerging manager dynamic is just like essentially scout funds. And there's a lot of like horse trading around like, yeah, we will do it. We will do the deal from our fund from started that way like 10 plus years ago. And like that when the market was much looser and it was a different market.

And it worked for us and we were able to scale up into being like a legit seed fund, with legit dollars and legit institutional investors. I just think like most things, all paths get super crowded, right? And so once the path is super crowded, it's just really hard to differentiate, it's really hard to make a good business out of it. And I do think like almost everyone's gonna go away.

Not everyone. Don't become a seed investor, You hear it. You heard it here Last want your quick take X AI's Portland data center fire. You think that's just a Little accident or you think Portland is doing Portland stuff. That'd be really funny That'd be really funny. It's it's um God have you guys ever read the science fiction or a parable of the sewer? No great book great I'm just finishing it now But there's a whole slum plot where there's all these people who are addicted to this drug that makes them like think that fire is The greatest thing on earth so they're just like setting fire to everything and like that's funny

It's it's I just looked it up. It's a post-apocalyptic story set in 2025. Wow Have you caught that when you're like they're basically about people like trying to walk north from L.A. to like north to Seattle to escape craziness. But the yeah. So I don't know if you told me that that drug was invented in Portland wouldn't blow my mind. Yeah, I think we got to get a plus. This is fantastic having you on.

Thanks so much. Always pleasure. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Talk to you. Cheers. Thank you for having me on. Thanks so much. Always a pleasure, Sam. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Talk to you. Cheers. Let me tell you about adquick.com.

Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we got Bobby. They are simply the best. Coming into the studio. Yep.

I'm going to do some VO3 generations for all of our partners. And we got Bobby. They are coming to the studio. Yep. I'm going to do some VO3 generations for all of our partners. Get those in the mix. Pull those up. I think it'll be fun. Get a little creative. We got Bobby coming into the studio.

Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Thank you for having me. Where are you? Are you in Miami right now? I am the last one standing in Miami. Yes, let's give it up. Yeah, I've seen some Miami.

I love Miami. I'm actually stuck around. Thank you very much. Yeah, standing in Miami. Yes, let's give it up. Yeah, I've seen some. Yeah, I love Miami. Thank you very much. Yeah. Yeah. I love Miami. I it's beautiful. Every time I get to go visit, it's always struck me as, uh, like the it's like a classier version of Las Vegas for tech. And it actually worked really well where in every industry there's always like the CES conference that happens in Vegas and it's a little bit below tech's, you know, prestige. And so if tech could assemble in Miami for events, that's great. Right. We gave it a real college try. It was happening for a while. You know, there's herediton and the best conference I've ever been to. Exactly. And it was cool that you get people that come from New York and they're not just

going to go home on the After the conference they're gonna stay in the same thing with SF same thing with LA So it was actually a feature that not everyone was there I feel like if you throw a conference in LA or SF a lot half the people are just gonna go home It was special for a moment. I Anyway, I got a what's up. I got a Doc's Bobby. Oh, yeah, because he pulled up to her at a con in a Ferrari. Let's go Actually just getting the buttons we done It's like the worst thing to be in this magnificent machine and then it's like I don't know if somebody

Yeah, like ate a hamburger and you you you you okay great I'll pick up my Ferrari and then she tries to adjust the seat She's like this is disgusting What were you doing in here this is terrible, it's all fixed now. That's all fixed now. Okay, that's good. Yeah, that's good Good to hear. Mind us. But yeah, give us the news. Give us the update. Give us a little introduction on yourself

for those who might not know. Yeah. So I'm so glad you guys had me on today. We had a very big announcement today. So this is something I've been thinking about for 15 years and we announced our new email client called Sunflower today. Cool. Thank you. It is like basically the opposite of inbox zero. Okay. Like, I think you have to have an email client that makes you work for it. Right. In other words, like you

load up in box zero, I don't care how many keyboard shortcuts, I don't care what you give me. But if I'm having a triage, every single email that comes in, you know, keyboard shortcut this way that way. Yep. From the Applebee's email. You know, no. Yeah, yeah. You need an email client that actually works for you. Okay. So on our marketing website, we don't mention the word AI one time. Huh? Wow. This thing is entirely this this product would not be possible five years ago. Okay. It's you

know, if you want to be if you think you need to be a superhero to use your inbox, there's a product for you. We're building a product for actual humans. Bold. And it launches, you know, the waitlist launches today, sunflower.me. Yeah. So walk me through the product. The product is like, I should actually get my phone before this because literally we broke Slack today.

Like apparently there's a limit to how many notifications it can send you. Like it just is dinging, dinging, dinging. That's great. Amazing. And the product is like already like you guys, you guys are, the product's like real, you guys are using it, right?

This is not, you're not just launching a wait list. Like there's something under the hood. We've been working on this for a year and a half. I use it every single day myself Yeah, it's about a dozen people right now who have this. Yep. Yep, you guys early alpha access Yeah, so talk to me about the actual workflow. I imagine I still have an email address people can still email me But I imagine an LLM is scanning every email that comes in Am I seeing the emails am I I mean I've used gmails Gemini features I one time I randomly clicked it and it just typed a response and it was like kind of decent

But it's honestly just a lot of clutter in the UI right now How are you thinking about hot on the hunt here? I'll be honest. Yeah. Well, I mean thinking about this I've actually was thinking I should just get a, I should just get an LLM to summarize every email and just text it to me. No, it's not that. And then I can just text back if I want to respond and I just never look at my inbox ever again.

I will try it. Oh, it didn't work? Currentmail.app, it's total dog shit. Yeah, it's just so funny that email, like the default state of email is like, here's stuff that's important, your stuff that's not important. And then it's only ranked by when it hit your inbox. Yeah, which is

status quo of email is that to do list filled out by other people. Yep, totally. And that's that's it. Right? You should be beholden to that. Right? Just because someone sends me an email doesn't mean I get a lot of emails. Yeah. Anyways, so, yeah, you were you were kind of close. We're going to reveal our hand more and more publicly. But it was like the firing the starting gun, like we're building in public now.

So you're going to hear a lot more. Don't share your revenue if it gets too high, people will copy you. We don't like going in public. Based on the signups we had today, we are cash flow profitable if everyone converts. How much of your time are you gonna be spending here versus investing going forward? That's a good question.

I personally funded this company for the alpha. To be able to read people's emails, you know, I, I, I, I, I read people's emails. You mean, I'm kidding. I know. I can't, by the way, I can't read anyone's emails. Yeah.

An exhaustive security review process with Google right now. Yeah. So no, there's no reading. You can sign up. Just Google. Just Sundar. Just Sundar. Yes. Sundar can read Sundart. Just Sundart. Yes. Yes, Sundart can solve your problem.

Sundart can read your emails, but not Bobby. I bet he can, actually. I bet that they're pretty locked down over there. But yeah, I mean, I remember the mailbox day is, and that launched. And one of the things that I loved that I loved was that once he got off the incredibly long wait list, it basically tricked you into just archiving everything which I thought was

a great paradigm because you kind of declare email bankruptcy you're not deleting these emails so they're still there and just that idea of hey you can archive things I had never archived an email before and I think a lot of people are in that boat where they have unread emails and they've read emails and they have a number that's like 10,000 next to their email app. What do you think? Sorry about that. Please.

I was friends with Gentry when he made mail. And I worked at Facebook at the time. And we're on this hike with my friend, Bo. And literally, it's like the Kalalau trail in Hawaii. It's like a two day hike. Like you're trekking it. The entire time he just talked about email the entire time. He's talking about email and the fact that he was about to propose to his now wife.

And I said, what are your topics on this engagement ring? Anyways, so I took a photo of him. It's a beautiful photo, you know, right at the end of the trail. And if you remember that app, you know, when you got to inbox zero, right, you saw this beautiful image. And I, and he hated that app the whole time. It just, it just launched. He was ranting to me the entire time about how much he hated mailbox

I was like, it's actually pretty good app in terms of gentry. It's sort of etc but anyway, so when I got back from the hike I sent gentry an email and I said hey, would you would you guys put this image into the app like as the you know, you're done like inbox zero state. And so, and then I took a screenshot and I said to him, I said, you're in the app now, you're in the app that you kind of hate it. That you despise, that's amazing.

And he took it a good piece, it was great. Yeah. We're not about inbox zero. I think inbox zero is a flawed concept. I think like, you know, we're entering. I want you to do this for texts, right? Right now I have 3,873 unread texts. And I have that because I don't feel an obligation

like just because somebody had my number at some point. And like, I really try to respond to the stuff that's important and pressing, but I'm not gonna like get home from work and be like, oh, I gotta respond to this person instead of hanging out with my kids, right? Like it's not. No, of course not.

Everyone feels entitled to your time. Yeah. Right? You know, look, I'm an investor. I get the same emails probably we all do, right? Like about 20 a day. And they're all like, drip auto campaign follow up. So it's like they send you a cold pitch email, and then you get you get the email, then you get the email. And then and then every single successive email like tries to guilt you into actually, you know, replying. Yeah, Start using more and more emotionally manipulative tactics.

Yeah. Damn. And it's like, no, no, no. Just because you know my email address does not entitle you to my time. Yeah. I think that's right. What do you think about that?

Are you going to tag? Are you going to identify emails that are being dripped versus artisanal, organic, farm to table emails? We're working on that. You know what we're also working on? Again, you know, there's a funny Steve Jobs quote, isn't it funny? A ship that leased from the top. Hmm.

Here you go. That's great. You know, you know, like email trackers, you know, obviously superhuman does this. Yep. I'm like, you know,'m like, you've seen it. We both allow you to block inbound trackers and we'll also let you send your own. So our thing is like, we are just so 100% focused

on the individual user. So in other words, if you want to block these trackers, perfect, we'll let you do that. And then you can send a tracker of your own. I like having those trackers. I like letting the SDR know, I read this 10 times and I'm still not responding. Yeah, that's awesome.

That's the feature you should build is a feature to open and close the email That's a better feature. Yeah. Yeah Pixel Dr. Is like this person they're reading it for hours every day what but they haven't responded what's going on? He does their tracking. Yeah, what is your take on Eric? McObski founder of? Pebble he started this companyer, eventually sold it to automatic. And the whole idea was get into the iMessage world, create one unified inbox for

all the different messages. I think he had a knockout drag out fight with Apple, because he was reverse engineering some of the API is obviously there's changes on in big tech around antitrust. it maybe now is the time to put pressure on that. Is there a world where we could see text and email kind of unify at some point? What's your view on kind of the long term here with Big Tech? I mean, look, we we have a we have a long term strategy. I'm not going to come on your podcast. Just spill all the beans. Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill,

spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, dumb. Yeah, yeah, golden retriever would just tell a golden retriever would just tell everyone.

No, no, no. No, you can come on again and you know, spill it every time. I'm gonna pass through one of your companies and I pass the other one. Okay. Anyway, yeah, future of text email. So I'm mostly concerned about email.

I think email, it's like what's old is new again, right? And so if I again, if I if I were a ship that's spilled from the top, here's what you have to here's what I have to say. Just like Apple built iMessage on top of SMS, I think there's a layer to be built on top of email. That's all I'm gonna that's all I'm gonna tease. That's all I'm gonna tease with. Anyway. Yeah, no, I think that's an interesting framework. I don't want to own all communication.

I don't want to pull it onto one place. I just want to clean up the mess that is email. Yeah, it is an interesting time, right? Because AI is transforming everything, But yet I feel pretty confident that I will have an email address that I have to use in 15 years. And that sounds kind of crazy and silly, but at the same time.

It's not going away. Fax machines, we talked with TJ yesterday about how he was spending 30% of their dev resources or something like that on fax machines. It's crazy. I went to Facebook, we launched as a joke, where he was spending 30% of their dev resources or something like that on fax machines, right? That pill pass. When I worked at Facebook, we launched as a joke, just the TechCrunch network only,

we launched a feature called fax this photo. Hmm. And they covered it. Wow. No way. Yeah, yeah, it was literally launched. Just to troll them? Oh yeah, you can Google this story,

like TechCrunch, Facebook, Fax This Photo. My engineering buddy, Evan, we were launching all these things one day. Fax Your Photos, 2009. Wow. Yeah, there you go. That's amazing. Okay, so Facebook punked us. This isn't really going live for everyone.

They tried to like pretend like they were in on the joke, but no, that's very funny. Got him. By the way, our homes team know the joke either. And so this guy Blake Ross, he had to run upstairs like, you know, you know, in a frantic rush saying, guys, guys, guys, guys, it's just a joke. It's just a joke. Yeah, full stack, verticalized mog. It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Bobby, this looks the real thing.

Bobby, this was super fun. Congrats on the launch. I'm excited to try the product and come back on. Come back on as you have more news to share. Amazing. Sunflower.me if I can get a plugin. For sure. Let's do it.

Go check it out. We'll talk to you soon. Go there now. See you guys. And if you're trying to visit Miami, you gotta head over to wander.com. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks get on Wander. And we got Orin Hoffman coming in the studio. He is here, so welcome to the the stream Orin. How you doing? What's going great happen to be here very excited great. Great to finally have you on. Yeah, I should have done this a long time ago We had a brief phone call. I think a couple years ago good to reconnect. What's the latest in your world?

Well, things are great. We're we've got a couple different things We've run a like a weird holding company where we own a bunch of data companies, start different data companies. Yeah. And then then we're also at Flex Capital, where we do a lot of seed stage investing. We did 20 deals last quarter. Wow. Also do about 100 per year. That's amazing. Yeah, we're kind of struggling to find what your title should be. So we just put founder and investor cuz you got you wear a lot of hats Yeah, I think you got like Sam less than on today. I'm yeah spiring Sam lesson. Okay. Okay, that's great. That's great How are you on the slope? So you're good skier? No, I'm not aspiring Yeah, I'm only spying on certain things okay like 20 other dimensions

Yeah, I'll never catch up. He plays a lot of tennis, he yaps a lot, but yeah. Yeah. He runs like three-minute miles, yeah. Three-minute miles, okay, I can talk to you about running. On the data side of your business, was that an AI bet that you made a long time ago? Is it, did you get lucky? Did you have incredible foresight?

I think I had the wrong bet. And so I think on the data business, I think we had believed that these companies that sell data, like data as the ingredient, not just like analysis on top of data, the ingredient. We thought that these companies would become like way more valuable because we thought the number of buyers of data would go up significantly. So if you think like, you know, people,

this is 10 years ago, people made, oh, there are maybe 50 hedge funds that buy data today, significantly. There's 11,000 hedge funds. The market's going to go from 50 to 500. I think the market went from 50 to like 58 over the last 10 years. So it really didn't go up. Retailers, there were maybe 20 retailers that bought a lot of data 10 years ago. Out of your, this will be tough to remember specifics,

but a lot of like seed stage companies will be like, oh, well, we're gonna generate this data and like, we're gonna sell it eventually and it's gonna be valuable. And it's like, oh, well, we're gonna generate this data and like, we're gonna sell it eventually and it's gonna be valuable. And it's like, oh, and then you kind of press them on it. And it's like, well, like hedge funds will buy it. And then it's like, okay, like, are you confident that those 58 hedge funds are,

have you seen, have you seen any of your- They're a terrible market. It's a very small market. And they've really, most of them are, even like the biggest hedge funds in the world, like Bridgewater, like the amount of data they buy is minuscule compared to the AUM. It's like it's basically zero Yeah, and is that just because they've been more like lunch. Yeah, are they getting data from other sources like more public sources? Are they scraping the internet or are they just not using data-driven algorithms?

I mean they have some data they have data that you could put in an Excel file and stuff like that. And they're not like, you're smart people who are thinking about quote unquote data. But when you actually think of like a data business that's selling data, proprietary data, different types of data, and usually data that's like larger than you could like put in Excel file. Most funds are not doing it. They're really, really, if you think of real estate, so when we were starting, the number of real estate investors

that were using data was zero, and today it's blackstone. It's like one. It's going from zero to one. Real estate is a pretty big asset class. Now, they're using some data, so people are using still some data, but really like we're talking about like real alternative data, really have a very sophisticated system to be able to ingest it and use it. It's very, very, very small. Is that driven by the fact that maybe it's almost like,

I mean, we've been thinking a lot about Google I.O. and V.O.3 and Google's advantage in video generation, particularly because they own YouTube and YouTube feels like an incredibly valuable data source. It's almost but the whole like data is the new oil. It's almost like no data is like a Rembrandt painting that there's only one of. And so Google doesn't want to sell that data. Like Google wants to keep that.

And so the like, yes, the data market would be bigger if all of these assets actually transacted and were fungible like oil, but they're not. They're super proprietary. And now if you have a brand, your data is more valuable. Sure. So if you've got something like Reddit and everyone knows Reddit, they understand what people are talking about on Reddit and they say, okay, we're having all these like interesting conversations.

They sell that to Google for $60 million or something to train their LLMs. And, but if you, if you had like lots of people having interesting conversations, but you weren't called Reddit, um, my guess is instead of 60 million, you might get 10 million or 5 million or something. Like the brand is actually the 10 X thing of why people want to buy it as well. Yeah. What about just creating data for the purposes of artificial intelligence, not pulling data from other sources and trying to go find a round peg in a square hole with selling into a hedge fund more like there is demand for robotics data right now. And we are going to go get a bunch of robots and generate.

I like that. Yeah. I'm obviously like scale. AI is a great company, right? So they're doing that. They're actually going to building those types of data. We just admit we're investing in a company, not doing what you're saying with the robots. I think those types of things are good, but it's not always just for the AI.

Like there's other types of buyers. Cause if you just are selling to like AI core model companies, you're, you're talking maximum of a dozen buyers. That's not a great market. And he went from 58 to, you went from 58 to 12. Yeah, exactly. So you just want to sell to open AI, Anthropic, Google and Facebook, like, and maybe a couple of others.

Like, I don't know, that doesn't seem like a great business long term either. Yeah. And if the deal, the first deal that you do is a hundred million, what's the deal size on the next one? You know, do you, are you going to create a hundred million dollars worth more data that you can sell to them? Is it even that valuable? Anyways, um, the, the, wanted to have you on specifically to talk about a

post that you had yesterday that went pretty viral. You said that any VC that makes you pay for their lawyers is not founder friendly founders barely affording rent should not be footing legal bills for VCs with private jets and yet this is standard. You kind of extrapolate on this, but you're writing 20 checks a quarter, maybe more. I'm sure that almost every single one of the companies you back ends up having to pay some VCs lawyer bill,

maybe in the next round. But I would love for you to kind of break down the post and what it's for those people don't know in a standard in term sheet somewhere in the term sheet, it says, usually it says the company must pay up to x dollars of the venture capital as legal fees, and that x can be negotiated and it can be as low as 10 grand and I've seen as high as 300 grand for more complicated deals and stuff like that. And it's there. And it just seems odd for a whole bunch of reasons.

First, it's like there may be many different investors, but you're only paying the lead investors types of things. Second is that why are they actually having the company pay? It's like a little bit of backdoor way to get your fees paid. And then there's like, there's like a more complicated argument as well, which is I don't think this is LP friendly. A lot of, a lot of VCs will say this is LP friendly. Because now I don't have to like, yeah, wouldn't the person paying, presume you can pass it, mean that the VC could pass the fees on to their LPs.

So in that sense, they're saying. Correct, so they could pass it on to their LPs. And this is a backdoor way of doing that without actually telling the LPs that you passed it on to the LPs. By taxing the company. It's taxing the company, but it's even the LP isn't aware of it. Whereas if you actually normally, if you use Tegus or something and you pass it

on to your LP, your LP sees the bill and they're like, why are you spending 50 grand on Tegus? Like you should be spending less and they can have a conversation or if you're like, if you're having air travel, they can understand that as well. So there's a whole bunch of reasons why it's like that. Can you give me more clarity around the idea of passing fees on two LVs? So like the real fees.

So VCs have like 2 and 20. But then there's certain fees that you can pass back that it gets it closer to even 3. You could get it up to like 2 and 1 half, 3, 4%. And that could even be like when a VC pays for lunch with a founder, you can pass that on, correct? Interesting. Yeah. And every VC has a different model.

Different structure. When we go to lunch with a founder. Because I always thought it would be like there's 2% fees, and then you got to do whatever you want with that. If you need a private jet, like that's coming out at 2%. If you need to pay salaries, if you need to pay for TIGAs, if you need to buy lunch, like it's all coming out of the 2% but you're saying it can be passed on. The true loaded fees can be much higher than 2%. Interesting. Yeah, like at Flex Capital, we try to almost do everything

in the 2%. So if we go to lunch with us, we take it out of our own management fee, which means we get less compensation because that, of course, you, most VCs want to protect that 2% and that goes directly to them, right? So we get less compensation, but we think it's more LP friendly. And then we'll there might be certain things like your your fund audit might be done to the. So you have to decide, OK, what is what's actually done to the fund versus what's done to the management company? So we are more to the management company. Every VC will do a different on how they do it.

But some can be like, but at least regardless, at least generally when I'm passing fees, at least the LPs do see it. Yeah. And then they can have a conversation like, Hey, why are you spending all this money with lunches? Talk to me. Why am I paying for your lunch to go to Spago or something? So whereas with the, with the, with the, uh, with the, um, uh, legal fees, they don't know.

The LP has no way of accounting that way. What about general pressure to bring down the cost of startup legal fees at the Series A level? Justin Kahn was working on a project with Atrium to try and automate the the series. Before you can even get there, there's like I think Ahmad had a good response to your post from Mercury saying that like he just basically tells the lawyers we're going to cap it at this and you agree up front and then the lawyers are

super motivated. But that's still that's better. That's the mod's amazing. And that's that's definitely step one. Like you got to negotiate that cap. Maybe you can't negotiate all the way down to zero, which is what I would like to see happen more, but you've got to negotiate it. My guess is also, it also depends on the higher the cap, the longer it will be to close your round. So most people know you get to be the other way around. Yeah, most people know you get to be the other way around Higher if it's a high cap the lawyers are just gonna be like yeah Because it should be it should be I mean To close it this weekend or 50k and yeah, you can take a month I can basically tell you like here's how you close your round. It's gonna be yep 15 days

Yep, plus one day for every two thousand dollars. That's in that days plus one day for every $2,000 that's in that. That will be exactly what it is for every single round that is in there. So backwards. Shouldn't one defense of startups eating the cost is that if you have an emerging manager with a $20 million fund and they're barely, you know, paying themselves a dollar in salary. And if they want to lead around that, that ends up getting priced, it could get

expensive, but your argument is still like, okay, well, LPs are still eating that, that cost. Yeah. I mean, look, it can be negotiated and it may be in some cases, it could make sense that's in there. But if you're why are you doing something so complicated? I mean, why see created the safe? The safe doesn't have any legal costs, right? Really?

You can actually use a pretty boilerplate thing. Most of these terms you should be negotiating in the term sheet anyway. So going from term sheet to close, which is where all the legal costs come in from term sheet to close. Why is that expensive anyway? It's because probably you're not managing the lawyers. The lawyers have no incentive to keep the costs low because they know what the cap is. If the cap says 50k, I guarantee you, you're getting a bill for no less than 49k. I guarantee you, you're getting a bill for no less than 49K. Like in the history of the world,

I doubt it has almost ever come in less than 49K for a cap of 50K. Like how do they automatically always hit the cap? They're filling the space. They're built different. The other thing as an LP, you don't wanna pay the fees and not get the ownership is the other thing, right?

It's like if you're just getting past the costs and you're like eating that but you're not getting Like that the incremental kind of dollars deployed into the company. Yeah, like the incremental ownership Is it does it? I mean, I guess like where I'd want to go with this is What do you have conviction or any excitement around tools that can be like AI tools specifically that can be introduced into the process like basically that term sheet to close period to just make that more efficient where we could say okay. In most cases but first of all we said, we were just involved in a company

that did term sheet to close in six days. Like it's not that hard, especially in the early stages of a company, like how much diligence do you need to do? You need to, and look, the company did a good job. They got all their stuff in a data room. They did all the things that they were supposed to do. Then as the venture capitalist, okay, well,

you've got to somehow read through it. Maybe you can use AI to read through some of it. You got to go check it. You have to make sure that the bank account is legit and all these other types of things that isn't fraudulent. It shouldn't take that much time. The main reason it takes a really long time is just the back and forth. You put a red line in, I send it to you, then you don't have time to look at it that day, it takes you three days, then you send it to me, then I say, if we actually all got in a room, that's what they did. So they got all in a room on day six. And they basically put like a four hour block and they said, we're going to just go through

every single issue right here. And they're able to iterate on it just live. And then you would, you would, you would put it on mute, You would talk to your lawyer to go back. It just got done. It's so much easier. And obviously even M and angry agreements, like you should be able to get those done so much faster. And actually those often do get done faster. Yeah. Like sometimes you can do an entire M and a, um, uh, from term sheet to close faster than you can do a VC financing. Many M and A's go faster than VC because everyone's just motivated to really work on it and put in the time to make it happen.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Come back on again soon. Sorry, we'll be on the end in 15 minutes. I love it. It might be any time. Yeah, this is great. Yeah, we'll make it happen.

Yeah. Great hanging. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Yeah, we have some breaking news. The first nuclear executive order has dropped. I'm going to read here from one call out that people are celebrating.

To maximize the speed and scale of new nuclear capacity, the Department of Energy shall prioritize work with the nuclear energy industry to facilitate five gigawatts of power up rates to existing nuclear reactors and 10 new large reactors with complete designs facilitate five gigawatts of power up rates to existing nuclear reactors and Ten new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030 This is exactly what we were asking for with let's copy paste Diablo Canyon We have Doug Bernhauer from radiant nuclear in the studio

We're gonna bring him in and get his breakdown on it because he's obviously been working in this industry for years and should be able to give us an update on what's happening. Thank you so much for joining the show. Doug, been too long since I saw you. I think I saw you in DC last, but should be an exciting day. But can you give us your read and analysis on what's happening? Yeah, it's unbelievably exciting. There's a whole lot of text. I had these fact sheets that came out. I think went to the media on all these executive orders.

It's unbelievably exciting, but it's all coming in like right now. I think the actual official documents just got posted only minutes ago. So I haven't read. So you're an expert. You're an expert is what you're saying. Well, we really put you on the spot. But I mean, can you talk to me about a little bit of the history? First, introduce yourself, what the company does, and then maybe we can build up to some of the maybe problems or areas for improvement that the industry has been asking for. And then we'll kind of dig into what's happening today. Yeah, thanks. So I'm the CEO of Radiance, a nuclear affordable microreactor company.

We're focused on mass production of one megawatt reactors. We'd like to see 50 of those per year and they'd come up factory line and then go out to the customer wherever they are, run for five years, and then come back and be refueled. So it's a very unique sort of model. And my background, before that I worked at SpaceX for 12 years. I worked on the first rocket with legs, amongst other really cool stuff for Elon, but eventually focused on nuclear. And it's a really unique model that we've been trying to work. You know, a normal reactor is about a thousand megawatts.

The thing we're working on is one megawatt. It's got to be road transportable. We're trying to make the nuclear power that people want, because the problem that we see with why we don't have all this nuclear technology today is really that there's not as many It's got to be road transportable. We're trying to make the nuclear power that people want because the problem that we see with why we don't have all this nuclear technology today is really that there's not as many customers, but that is all completely turned around, I don't know, in the past maybe just two years, right?

With all these announcements of the big data center players coming in to buy nuclear, to restart old plants, to build new ones. And we've actually been fighting for a lot of regulatory reforms that we see as probably being necessary for our particular model, where you've got a really a factory that makes reactors,

where you have assembly and you don't have any construction. And if you read the rules that are 50 years old, you hear about construction a whole lot. And so it's not really focused on or talking about the right sort of thing. So yeah, when we last spoke, you were working on the helium loop, going to test at a dome in Idaho. Uh, how are things going? What have been the most recent updates for radiant?

Yeah, there's some legal updates. I, just a month ago we were announced as one of just five companies who will get access to fuel from the department of energy, uh, something we wouldn't work on for a very long time. It's unbelievably exciting. When I started the company back in 2020, we said we would do a critical test with a reactor at full scale in 2026. We are on target to do that. And really, I mean, because of that announcement and the support that we're getting from federal government. Another change just recently, you know, we've been working through a process they have the national labs, we're working with Idaho National Laboratory, and the

fun context that are here, they've tested actually 52 reactors in their history. Although the last of which was in 1977. So it's been a while and you have a kind of old process, they are where anybody was there anybody that was a part of that last test that's still there or is it all just kind of lore at this point? It is sort of lore it is sort of lore for the new reactors but there definitely are staff for there you know there are the advanced test reactor the ATR reactors where they test all the navy fuel that's been operational

for a very long time you can go tour tour it today, it's still operating. So there are definitely staff there who are very familiar with reactor operations and refueling. They also have a transient pulse test reactor, which is pretty amazing. It actually has an original core from the 1950s still running and operating. I forget what the numbers are, but it pulls us into the several gigawatts range. So there's some expertise there, but certainly there are not people there from the early 1970s anymore. Okay. I have the, uh, Wall Street journal article pulled up. I want to read some of the key points and, uh, just get your reaction.

So, uh, the high level is that Trump signed executive orders to boost nuclear power industry, citing the need to overhaul regulations and fast track licenses. A lot of this is driven by tech companies like Amazon and Google, who are driving demand for nuclear power to support AI systems and data centers. And there's an interesting wrinkle there where a lot of the hyperscalers made very aggressive ESG targets and climate pledges before they knew that they were going to need 50 gigawatts of capacity

And so now they're really really pushing for clean energy The executive order aims to shorten approval times for new reactors, but critics worry about the impact of safety now I want to talk to you about that balance between Speed and time to market and safety. I wouldn't trust myself to design a nuclear reactor and get it approved in a day I wouldn't trust myself to design a nuclear reactor and get it approved in a day. But it feels like we haven't had a new reactor design approved in way too long. And so we're probably on the too slow side of the curve. But where should we be? What is a reasonable amount of time to actually approve a new reactor design? In your opinion? Yeah, I mean, probably on the shortest scale, it's got gotta be something like six months.

Like if I use that context I said earlier, 52 reactors up till just 1977, nuclear technology only existing since the mid 50s. That means they were doing more than two per year. Yeah, yeah. Let's get back to that standard, right? Walk us through what, what, what, just as a citizen, not as an entrepreneur

or founder or executive, as a citizen, as an entrepreneur or founder or executive as a citizen What type of tests do you actually think are the most valuable is this? You I need a physicist to run all the numbers in a spreadsheet and run simulations Do we need to just fire this up in a place where even if it explodes? It's it's you know, we've seen that it didn't explode and so we've done real-world testing is a balance of those What kind of testing do you think is best that can be executed at speed? Yeah, well, it's a great question. The best is immediate testing incremental testing yeah, and there's no reason that

You necessarily need to go slower You can regulate along with the speed with which you can do the design, the analysis, the procurement, the assembly of a reactor. If a company is willing to spend capital to take that financial risk, the goal is don't put fuel in unless you get an approval. But there should be really zero barriers up until that point because there's no safety risk. But then when you get to that point of like, okay, now there is risk, we are going to load

fuel in, you do want someone to go and check your numbers and you want them to dig deeply and thoroughly into what your reactor is and does and what the plan is. But the fact of the matter is when you load fuel, it's not anywhere near critical. You can look at subcritical multiplication factor that will trigger little sensors that are effectively something that sounds like a Geiger counter. We use fancier things today. We use vision chambers. We use boron line proportional counters.

You can do the analysis to show that you will get many, many counts per second, even with a very small amount of fuel loaded. Like let's say you construct one sixth of your core, you can already validate models. And yet you are ridiculously far away from being able to go critical. Interesting.

You haven't even assembled the whole system, right? Yeah, so the FDA has similar approval timelines for new pharmaceutical drugs, but the reason that it takes a long time to approve a new pharmaceutical drug in America It makes more sense to me because if i'm going to take a drug I kind of want to know Hey, is it gonna is it gonna have an effect on me in 30 years? So maybe I want to see a mouse model or a monkey model or a dog model or even human testing over a long period of time

And sure, there's some acceleration there We don't need to wait a full lifetime to approve a new drug But there is an element of time is there anything that's that's comparable to that in nuclear where the behavior of a system? Over a two-year time period is different than a behavior of a system over a two-hour period Yeah, I think the most similar thing would be the effect of neutron fluence inside of the core Mm-hmm. So if you hit some part of parts of your system with neutrons, they will generally swell up Metallic parts swell up and their thermal conductivity will usually go down their density goes down But the physical shape of them changes sure so you might have to test that in some special way to know what a ten-year

Lifespan looks like right? Yeah But a lot of these materials have been tested and there are these giant data handbooks that it's very predictable. So there's like the nuclear systems materials handbook, which is like put together in the 1970s, actually just released finally through this lengthy process where we had a ton of help. We went and recovered this great national asset

and it's now available for all reactor developers. That's amazing. Yeah, so they're pretty predictable effects. So there's not, I would say there's really, other than the effects of neutron fluence, there's nothing really that challenging. We plan to test right next year in the dome. That is a hermetic structure, totally sealed with its own radionuclide detection in it. And so you can partially fuel a core and you can do it in a hermetically sealed chamber at a facility where it's surrounded by scientists

right and experimental Hot cells and other test facilities that would allow you to see what any problem is solve any problem But we are using all well-known standard materials Got it makes sense Were you is it funny to you that the news of Taiwan decommissioning their reactors hitting the same week that we're saying that we need more?

Or is there something about Taiwan's as an island? I had read something about there being a bunch of, enough earthquake activity in the area that there was some potential reasoning around that. But then we also had someone else on who said we have solutions for that at this point. It's not a risk that should require shutting it down entirely.

I don't know that these things are linked, actually. I think I'm behind on the Taiwan reactor news. Those might've just been around for a long time, might be coincidental. It's not. No, no, I'm not implying that they're linked. I was saying more that it's kind of ironic in the sense that like, you know,

we have one country saying, we're shutting these things down meanwhile, and they're far less energy independent. And Germany kind of doing the same thing. It feels like some countries are following the American nuclear playbook from two decades ago. And maybe they should be adopting the playbook from today. And they need to.

Well, we just announced it today. Yeah, so hopefully. How monumental is this for you? Were you like betting the company in some way on eventually getting an administration that would like introduce an EO and like, you know, try to bring about policy around this? I think, yeah, in a lot of ways. Absolutely. If you're working on something innovative,

there's going to be regulatory gray areas, you have to know about those gray areas and manage the direction they're going in to make sure that the vision that you have is the right the way that the administration or the Regulatory agencies go so that you're not decoupled from reality But you do have impact on that and you actually you know You can't write down rules ahead of time for something that's not invented yet Right, so you but you do always take some risk in doing that But I think it's actually pretty beautiful you lay out a vision go like imagine you have like a bunch of reactors

They're all built identical to one another so they're super reliable you deploy a whole fleet of them They all stream data back continuously. We're in the modern world. We're in the information age Why can't all that data just stream to the regulator? Why can't it be completely modernized? Yeah, we've been talking about that for a while while and I think that has led to now, uh, that along with other things people have said have led to these sort of events where the administration goes, okay, we're going to just, we're going to actually go and support this. Yeah. Uh, last question from my side. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the market

playing out? Obviously there's some news about where we might be getting really big nuclear reactors at the one gigawatt scale you're building at the one megawatt scale. Is there going to be a 10 gig, 10 megawatt company 100 megawatt company? Is it a smith or the same company and you just Yeah, or maybe they're maybe they're bundled or broken down or scaled up or scaled down? Like, where like, how will this play out and and and who will do what I guess? Yeah, well as a consumer what you want is for there to be two or more companies at each scale. Yeah, right and

Yes, there will be something at the portable microreactor scale made to two companies there at least and maybe that's one megawatt and smaller If you are willing to put a reactor in the ground somewhere and pull the fuel out on that site and put it in a system, you can make a bigger reactor. I call it a microreactor at 10 megawatt scale, so you want two companies there. You want two at the 100 megawatt. You want two or more at the gigawatt also because different areas need these amounts of power. So if you think about, and we never think about these places, there are remote places in the world. Like in Alaska, you have over 150 disconnected micro-reactor

locations or micro grid, sorry, locations that could use reactors. Canada has over 200 of these sort of areas. And these are coastal. Look at those land areas on the map. They're massive. They have a need for areas on the map. They're massive. They have a need for heat and for power. They're extremely isolated.

There isn't an actual grid. So you need a small system on those types of regions. And if you put in a 1 gigawatt reactor somewhere, you had better have a lot of big power lines to move that power to enough customers to use that. So on the two extreme ends of the scale, there's pretty obvious use cases. And then in the middle,

it's like if you don't wanna wait years to upgrade the grid, or it would be very expensive, like a million dollar a mile or more, upgrades to power lines, then you might go, well hey, we have this region where we're gonna use 10 megawatts,

we could put a 10 megawatt reactor, that's economical for us, right? Without over-complicating it or having to add power lines extending across states. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for popping on. We'd love to have you back again and go even deeper. Thank you for the insight and congratulations on the overnight success. The job's not finished, but I like this for you guys.

Yeah, this is great. It's great news. Yeah, it's really exciting. I mean, one of the coolest things they they asked to reform the process that we're using at national laboratories to test reactors That's gonna be extremely critical to us staying on our schedule. We will achieve Going critical next year Because of a lot of things happen today. That's great news Thank you We'll talk to you soon. Amazing milestone. Cheers. Good luck. Talk to you soon. I wanted to pull up, we're going to stay on nuclear for a little bit.

We're going long. We want to pull up Scott Nolan, my former colleague at Founders Fund and the CEO of General Matter and Nuclear Fuel Refinement Company was in the White House. CEO of General Matter. We're an American enrichment company trying to bring back the U.S.'s lead in producing nuclear fuel. So just like car engines need fuel, nuclear reactors need fuel, right now the U.S. is completely dependent on other countries to make the key step of enrichment in this field. And these executive orders are going to pave the way for the U.S. to regain its lead.

So we really appreciate it. Would you be doing the A.I. plants, because we have a lot of them going up now, or soon going up, and they need tremendous electricity? Are you going to be involved in many of these plants? Yes. Will Scott Nolan, CEO of General Motors, run the American entrant company?

Kind of a white house. Color temperature, a little bit off on that video. But otherwise, fantastic. Yeah, well, we. I'm from Ballard. Yeah waiting room bring him in. Let's bring him in And he is building at the 10 megawatts And so there everyone's got everyone's playing in the different market. There he is. Thanks so much for calling in. Can you give us the breakdown?

How you doing? Doing really well. Thank you so much for having me on guys. I'm actually just coming back from going live on a little upstart called Bloomberg TV. So, you know, it'll take a while for them to catch up to your stature. Yeah. But it's kind of like a feeder. It's like kind of like a feeder system. Yeah.

Feeder system. Can you go with your phone? Yeah, yeah, sure. There you go. Yeah, that's right. A little feeder network for the technology brothers. So great to be in the temple technology today. Yeah, it's good to have you break it down for us. We read kind of the highlights, but what were the key pieces of the EO in your opinion? Yeah, listen, this is a total rewrite of the regulatory system in the United States for nuclear energy. Nuclear grew up in the US with a total dominance of nuclear power in terms of US strategy.

So we have the only nuclear reactors in the world for a while. We piloted essentially every nuclear reactor architecture that there is, and we wanted to protect that edge and protect that advantage. And so what we did is we built these high regulatory walls around the nuclear environment, hoping that nuclear wouldn't spread around the world.

We wanted to protect this advantage. This is a natural instinct. I think it was a good instinct at the time, but the problem is that over time our competitors or geopolitical rivals built nuclear anyway. And where we are now is that these walls that we built to protect our advantage in the United States actually eroded our advantage.

And we ended up building a large wall around an empire of dirt. And so today this is about bringing those barriers back down, allowing American entrepreneurs to build nuclear energy again. There's a couple of really important things announced here. One is revitalizing the Department of Energy. So the Department of Energy was created

to be a nuclear test agency. Not a lot of people realize this, but the DOE, we kind of imagine it to be this, broad-based energy agency, and it is, but it was actually it to be this broad based energy agency. And it is, but it was actually created to be a nuclear reactor test agency. And since it was created, it's only done that one time. And so this is about revitalizing that. And actually, President Trump has given a strong commission to the nuclear industry. He wants three test reactors critical on US oil by July 4th, 2026, America's 250th birthday.

And just a few minutes ago, we announced with the governor of Utah for the first time, that we're partnering with the government to full charge, full steam at hitting that goal, and turning on a reactor by July 4th, 2026 at the San Rafael Energy Test Center in Utah. So that's what we announced today. Congratulations. That's amazing, Nils.

Good luck. Thank you. Good to meet you. Overdive success. So yeah, I mean, it seems like with any nuclear project, regulatory is always the main risk, the main rate limiting factor with regulatory. Out of the picture, is this more of an engineering challenge

now? Is it a manufacturing challenge? Like how do you weight the different challenges ahead for you to hit that deadline? That's absolutely right. Listen, you know, nuclear is a technology that we've been exploring for 70 years now. We've done an enormous amount of physics around this. We've done an enormous amount of research. The thing that has stood in the way is one company deciding to be the SpaceX of nuclear, right? Deciding to own nuclear energy, full verticalization from the design of reactors to construction,

to manufacturing, to deployment, to operation. That's what Valor Atomics is attempting to do. There hasn't been a Ford of nuclear energy yet. There hasn't been a Tesla of nuclear energy yet. There hasn't been a SpaceX. Valor Atomics is intending to be that company. And regulation has absolutely been the long pole in that tent. So this executive order is incredibly important. You know, I think this is

really going to set the tone for the next 100 years of energy dominance. If we're going to win on AI on manufacturing on supply chain, we're going to do it with a ton of cheap energy. Talk about the first product 10 megawatts. Is that correct? 25 megawatt electric is our commercial model. So, why do you sell valetomics? Yeah, we've gone out and we've really hit an ambitious milestone. I founded this company about 17 months ago.

We were intending to go out and build our first prototype reactor in 18 months. We finished it in 16 months. This is a test reactor sitting in our Los Angeles facility today. We've operated above temperature, above pressure, not with uranium, not splitting atoms yet, but with electrical simulation. And really what we proved is that it's possible to build a nuclear reactor in under 18 months. Now that we've done that, we go and actually build it again in Utah and another one in the Philippines.

And we actually load them with uranium for the first time, turn them on. After that, we go and build our commercial model, which is this 25 megawatt unit and build thousands of them around the world. Very cool. Jordy, anything else? Sounds pretty simple. Yeah.

Just draw the rest of the owl. Yeah. Just draw the rest of the owl. Yeah. We make thousands of nuclear reactors. We make trillions of dollars. I'm very excited. It's a good day in energy. Yeah. I mean thousands of nuclear reactors. We make trillions of dollars. I'm very excited. It's a good day in energy.

Yeah, I mean, it's fantastic. We were just talking with Doug from Radiant. And in many ways, if you started a nuclear company at any point in history, you were betting on activity like we're seeing today and action. And so super validating for for you guys that had to get looked at like you were crazy and a bunch of pitch meetings early. Because it feels like one of those things where like culturally, I think in 2020, people started kind of waking up to like,

hey, wait, nuclear is pretty cool and probably good. And we probably want more reactors, not less. And then companies that, you companies that have started picking up. How important is it for you to vertically integrate into the actual productive use of the energy? It feels like there's so much demand for energy. You could just become a mass manufacturing for nuclear reactors and that would be enough of a business. When we talked last time, about a year ago,

you were talking about generating fuel out of the air with this energy, but it feels like you might just want to let the free market decide what the best and highest use of the energy is. Is there still a plan to do something with the energy that you own and control and decide, or is it just like, let's just make as many nuclear reactors as possible right now?

Yeah, one of the core realizations of Valor is that there are some products that the market actually doesn't know how to buy. So I think this is one of the most important realizations that Elon had with SpaceX, which is that if you're going to make a rocket company that makes really good rockets, you also need to fly them. You can't just build a rocket. You have to fly them too. And the reason is that if you're gonna make a rocket company that makes really good rockets, you also need to fly them, right? You can't just build a rocket, you have to fly them too.

And the reason is that the customer actually doesn't know how to fly the rocket, right? A small sat company, a telecom company, doesn't know how to fly a Falcon 9. And so it turns out the best way to use a Falcon 9 as SpaceX is to actually own the entire operational cadence and then you sell products like kilograms to orbit and internet connectivity. So that's the right way to think about these really, really complex technologies.

Nuclear reactors are like this as well. So yeah, when we think about building lots of reactors, we think about building them on these very large energy campuses, and then we sell energy. We sell energy, not nuclear reactors. That might mean energy to AI data centers. Absolutely, it means hydrogen hydrogen and it means eventually Synthetic fuels right if we can make a synthetic fuel cheaper than diesel cheaper than gasoline We can actually become you know the energy company of the world right because the majority of the energy today is in a hydrocarbon

Format so that's that's kind of the core realization that we have when starting dollar. They're cool. Well, good luck Thanks for calling in. Well, good luck. Thanks for calling in Yeah, huge day. Congratulations To you as a whole industry. Cheers What a great show whole world tour Four hours now. I guess we just hit four hours Anything else we need to cover before we get out of here? I think breaking news John. What's that?

It's the weekend. It's the weekend And as always our board has been very explicit about this Leave us five stars on Apple podcast or less I don't feel like it just review us this far your four hours in I'm guessing we earned that five stars So just do it everybody have a great Memorial Day weekend. We actually won't have a Monday show because we're moving into the new studio, but we'll be back in full force in the new studio

in the temple on Tuesday. We're excited. Cheers. Have a great weekend. Have a good one. Bye.